Investing in Closed Source ELT is Building Up Technical Debt

The data industry is increasingly fragmented with a multitude of tools and services available for various niches such as data integration, analytics, observability, and cataloging. This presents both opportunities and challenges for data practitioners. One key decision to make is between open source and closed source Extract, Transform, and Load (ELT) tools. Open source software allows users to modify and distribute the code freely, while closed source software requires a license and its source code is owned by the creators. Technical debt can accumulate due to an overreliance on closed source tooling, which may lead to reduced development velocity, increased maintenance overhead, product defects, and decreased team agility. To mitigate this, it's essential to strike a balance between open and closed source ELT tools based on the maturity of the data platform in question.