title: Is the Confluent Platform based on Kafka free? open source?
body: <p>Kafka itself is completely free and open source.</p>
  
  <p>Confluent is the for profit company by the creators of Kafka. The Confluent Platform is Kafka plus various extras such as the schema registry and database connectors. I presume Confluent makes money by selling support contracts and services.</p>
  
  <p>Is the Confluent Platform free and/or open source? Am I obligated to purchase licensing or paid support?</p>