Franz now Open Source

What it says on the tin. Almost 4 years after Announcing Franz, I've decided to open source it under the 3-clause BSD license and to stop selling commercial licenses. The code is available on GitHub and free builds of the latest version are now available on its website.Why now?Sales tapered off and I wanted to have one less thing on my mind.Commercial PostmortemOver its commercial lifetime, Franz made approximately $5.5k in license sales, and I've given out on the order of 10-15 free licenses to students. Amusingly, there was some piracy, either folks that built the source-available version for themselves without having purchased a license or folks that figured out a way to reset the trial period (not that I made that hard at all).Was it worth it?Yes! I learned a lot about the inner workings of Kafka while building the client. The project fed back into some nice OSS for the Racket ecosystem 1, and I got paid for some of my time.actor-lib, kafka-lib, Noise, and improvements to gui-easy…