Navigating Change After Acquisition

Ashley Jeffs shares his journey with Benthos, an open source stream processor that was acquired by Redpanda. We talk about the evolution of data streaming technologies, the challenges he faced while growing the project, the decision to bootstrap versus seek venture capital, and what ultimately led to the acquisition. We discuss reactions to licensing changes, what it’s like to have your thing acquired, the challenging yet fulfilling nature of open source work, what’s next for Benthos, and what it takes to enjoy the journey.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members get a bonus 2 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Augment Code – Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates.
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.

Featuring:

• Ashley Jeffs – Website, GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Data streaming and Benthos with Mihai Todor & Ashley Jeffs (Go Time #192)
• Announcing Bento, the open source fork of the project formerly known as Benthos - WarpStream - Stream More, Manage Less
• warpstreamlabs/bento: Fancy stream processing made operationally mundane. This repository is a fork of the original project before the license was changed.
• Benthos | Benthos
• Redpanda Acquires Benthos to Deliver a Complete, End-to-End Streaming Data Platform
• redpanda-data/connect: Fancy stream processing made operationally mundane

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!