Build the Future: See it. Fix it. Give it back.

At a previous job, Josep Prat once asked his supervisor whether he could spend part of his time at work contributing to open-source software, the kind that companies share freely and build on together. It took a year to get an answer. When it finally came, it granted him permission to do something else entirely.

He’s not bitter about it, though. But the anecdote illustrates how different his current working life is.

Josep is a maintainer of Apache Kafka. In plain terms, Kafka is a piece of open-source software that thousands of companies rely on to move data quietly between their systems. It’s the sort of infrastructure almost no one sees, but a great deal depends on it. Being a maintainer means he is one of a small, trusted group who gets to decide what goes into it.

Who owns the right?

Most of us, when we leave a job, we leave our work behind with it. What you built or created usually belongs to the company you worked for, and someone else picks up where you left things. In the open source world the right to shape a project is granted to a person, not their employer. You earn it over years, through work you have personally done, and the project's own community recognises it in your name. It is not a title Aiven handed him or a licence Aiven owns.

"If I leave the company, I am the one with that right, not the company," he says. "I got these things because of me, not because of where I work."
That rearranges the usual relationship between a person and their employer. He stays because the work is good and truly open, not because anything obliges him to, which is also why how Aiven treats open source is not a detail to him but the whole basis of the job.

If Aiven decided to abandon open source, he would leave. The work and the openness behind it are one and the same to him, and a company that kept one without the other simply wouldn't be one he'd want to work for.

Giving it back

When Josep joined, it was into a team built to do nothing but contribute to open source full time, the Open Source Program Office. He believed in it completely.

"It makes no sense that the very same thing we make money from, we leave unmaintained and don't care about," he says.

Then, in October 2024, Aiven dissolved the team. Its people, Josep included, were folded into the wider product organisation. For a while, it felt as though the company had set aside something central to it.

It turned out to be the opposite of an ending. The work wasn't stopped but spread, carried into the product teams rather than kept in one corner of the company, and Josep moved with it. He is now Senior Engineering Director, still responsible for everything around Aiven's Kafka work.

The proof is in the numbers he quotes with some pride. Aiven is a fraction of the size of the big tech firms, yet it has more people helping maintain Kafka than Amazon does. Some of the really large global players give nothing back at all. The thing Josep had feared losing was still there after the reorganisation, and reached further into the company than before.

Independent and free to fix

There is a directness to him that's hard to fake. On the open source project itself, he is not Aiven's man, and he says so flatly.

"I'm here for the good of the project, not for Aiven's interest in the project."
A maintainer caught favouring his employer loses the standing that made him a maintainer at all, so the company can't ask him to compromise the project, and the project can trust that he won't. His reputation and Aiven's are two sides of the same coin, and he likes it that way.

It also makes Aiven, in Josep’s telling, an unusually satisfying place to work. At other companies, he says, the broken thing in front of you is simply not your problem to fix, you might not even be allowed to look.

"Here it's the opposite. You see something that isn't working in the underlying technology, and you're more than welcome to just go and fix it. We own the whole thing."