Hey all! Quick question, i see that Meltano gets for at least tap/target a lot of its power by using singer spec and to some extend seems to be a continuation of the evolution of stich/singer in a friendlier ux. Singer and Stich were amazing but since Stich was bought by Talend it hasnt been the same. My q is here, what prevents meltano from going the same path when i start contributing? It would be amazing if we can grow the community strong enough so it can at least survive for a little bit past the exit! Would love to hear about it!

I'm sure @douwe_maan wants to say something here 😄 But FWIW, Meltano is seriously investing into the community, e.g. by hiring me (and I think one could phrase my job as "to help grow the pie for everyone", so supporting Meltano as a piemaker, not a pietaker).

@douwe_maan would be interested to hear your view

I’ll chime in here too if that’s cool 🙂 The great thing for the community about Meltano is that everything is MIT licensed currently. If we disappeared as a company today, Meltano would still be a great choice to run Singer taps and targets, the SDK would still be incredibly useful, and you could use all of the plugins within Meltano still (dbt Airflow etc.). So that lowers the risk there (let me know if you disagree though). Sticking with the open source theme, hopefully our GitLab roots, along with our actions since founding, give us credibility in terms of stewarding Open Source software and believing in it as a viable model to build a project and company. I’d also say that Singer is a powerful community in its own right even before we got involved, We’ve found that it’s a very active community but sometimes folks are so busy building they don’t shout from the rooftops that they’re using it 😄 Turning this question around on you a bit - what would you like to see from the community and Meltano to ensure it remains active and strong?

Taylor is 💯 right, but allow me to repeat some of what he said in my own words written before I saw his: The big difference is that while Stitch was a proprietary SaaS Singer runner, Meltano is open source and self-hosted, meaning that whatever happens to Meltano the company, all the bits the community needs to keep Singer alive aren’t going anywhere: they can take over maintenance of [Meltano itself](https://github.com/meltano/meltano), as well as our [Singer SDK](https://github.com/meltano/sdk), and both have dozens of organizations contributing to them already outside of our core team. So the worst-case scenario of having a large library of Singer taps/targets but the sole maintainer of the runner and development tools losing interest can’t happen here; Meltano will be alive as long as there are people motivated to make it so, and with every user we add to the community as long as we have the resources to invest in it, that pool grows. We raised money again earlier this year that will last another two years, and we’re currently building out our [Managed](https://meltano.com/managed) offering for those users not comfortable self-managing, as we need to show we can build a business and earn the right to keep investing in open source data tooling. But the majority of our users will always be free/open-source, so growing our pool of potential customers starts with growing the Meltano/Singer community, so that’s what we’re focused on as a business besides building out the product. If we don’t make it past the next 2 years, or a future acquirer loses interest, Managed will suffer, but we’ll leave behind thousands of organizations motivated to keep it going, and the bits needed to keep improving the open source tooling or even stand up a new managed solution.

Hey thank you all! Very nice! This settles some of my worries!

@emile_bosch Only some? 😄 Happy to discuss any others