As a freelance engineer who's a long time Benthos contributor and who volunteered a lot of community support for this project in the past several years, I don't think it makes sense to fork it and I'm perfectly happy with the current approach where the core engine (https://github.com/redpanda-data/benthos) is MIT licensed as @jeffail mentioned and 3rd party plugins can live in other people's repos and have various licenses, one example being https://github.com/redpanda-data/connect.

I'm 100% committed to keep contributing to Benthos as long as it remains free and open source and I'm also happy to continue offering community support to whomever requests it on the official channels on Discord, Slack, GitHub etc.