When IBM announced its $11 billion agreement to acquire Confluent (shortly after also absorbing DataStax), most of the commentary focused on what it means for Kafka’s roadmap, or whether IBM can execute on a cloud-native integration strategy. While reasonable questions, engineering leaders are probably asking them too narrowly.
What happens to engineering autonomy when the open source tools a team depends on stop being neutral?
We’ve seen this movie before
The pattern is familiar enough to probably deserve a name. An open-source…

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