Haha the question of the hour. I'll give you my thoughts. I looked at SmartBear. They do not appear to be some kind of Borg that will chew up Pact. They are already in the world of providing support for open source projects such as Cucumber and Swagger - and both those tools fit into the world of testing and APIs. So I am hopeful. Perhaps they can provide needed infrastructure for things like sales and marketing and IT so the Pact team can focus on features.
But an acquisition is always risky and I think we'll all need to keep an eye on things. What is our backup plan? This always needs to be part of the consideration when working with third parties.
For me I'm glad to know much of Pact is in open source, although SSO and bidirectional contracts are really important and would be missed.
The system is setup such that if our commercial endeavour fails - maybe the market doesn’t like the product, we don’t deliver on our promises etc. - the OSS ecosystem will be there with open arms.
I don’t see this changing under SmartBear, given the two thriving communities mentioned above.