Fascinating times in the ebb and flow of open source projects. I initially dipped my toes in the open source community back in the mid 2000's. At the time I was looking for a cheaper ETL alternative to the big dogs at the time (IBM/Ascential Datastage, and Informatica). There were a few alternatives at that juncture, but I leaned toward Kettle and Talend. After many trials I ended up diving head first into kettle due to its flexibility and scalability, which eventually became Pentaho Data Integration.
I consider myself very lucky at the time to be in the "wild west" of open source. I was part of a small startup consulting company that provided open source analytic solutions. We provided guidance on a plethora of projects for a few years and had a ball doing it! Eventually we were acquired by Pentaho and helped lead that company to a successful acquisition by Hitachi Vantara.
Over those years I slowly saw the great open source projects gobbled up by large companies (which subsequently made all those closed source). It was sad times to see that happen. Fast forward to the past couple years. There are some newer players in the open source ETL market (Keyboola, Airbyte, Singer, Apache Nifi, etc.).
But, what really caught my eye was the resurgence of what was formerly kettle and Pentaho Data Integration. Apache Hop https://hop.apache.org/ is a fork of kettle/Pentaho Data Integration from its true open source days. The original architect, Matt Casters, is leading the team, and there are a lot of great new use-cases for it! It is well out of incubator status and is already up to a stable version of 2.3.
Exciting times! Check it out!
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