Is everybody here (planning on?) using this software to build companies with more than $25 million in revenue… and they can’t use something else with a more permissible license… and don’t think they could or should pay a licensing fee when they (inevitably?) hit that revenue target?
I have no problem with companies using whatever license, I do have trouble with them getting traction being open and then turning around as soon as they can squeeze a little money out of the people who were fooled.
I don't use Akka, but I feel the pain of the people who did that and now has to tear the thing out. Because I don't see how anyone would want to use it, that pricing is completely ridiculous. No one should pay per vCPU, much less those extortionate amounts.
They will be free to continue using the version of Akka they currently use. If there was ever any assumption of future free versions, without remuneration, that was misguided. Akka could have been abandoned at any moment.
If management blamed me for the company blissfully reaping the benefits of open source, I would be glad to work elsewhere. The customers of Akka have gotten exactly as much as they have paid for.
Did you feel their elation at being able to use Akka for free? They can, as long as they stay on the Apache versions.
> Bait and switch is never nice
I don't see any bait and switch here. If you can find Akka devs saying "we'll let you use this for free forever and we'll keep updating it for free forever" then I'll eat it, but until then, this is just how software licensing works.
Having that license made it clear the company want to reserve the right to change the license, including going to closed source if they decide to.
Plus, you made it sounds like an open source project has a moral obligation to the companies that uses it for free. That seems backwards.
No, they're just going to not bump Akka until they can either find a replacement, or accept a new version with a new license. You do not need to bump it every month, you can live with half a year of not patching it while you make your decision.
Additionally, your company is making 25 million in revenue, they can afford the extremely minimal cost. Not accepting that cost shows the company for what it is, a bunch of leeches.
I highly suspect very few will ahve to tear it out. It'll cost more money to replace than it would to pay license fees for many companies. Developer time costs money.
> Because I don't see how anyone would want to use it, that pricing is completely ridiculous. No one should pay per vCPU, much less those extortionate amounts.
These are companies making lots of money. The license fee isn't that much when it comes to the amount the company is making.
I would be very careful to use "open source" technology from companies that depend on sales from this piece of technology. Did this particular piece help get the company to $100M+? Yes, and people too often forget where technology got them to, when blaming said technology. Could something other have work too? (Yes, see Redis)
I feel your comment is a gross misrepresentation of the problems posed by replacing a FLOSS license like Apache with a proprietary one.
Software that was released yesterday under a license like Apache will remain FLOSS today, and usable under the exact same terms. Subsequent releases won't, but the one version you've been using to sell your product/service will remain usable under the old terms.
Now, I don't know if I can contribute (which includes usage, because the more I use it, the better I understand it and the more confidently I can recommend it and help others to use it) to software that's trying to do the OSS paid support model, because that company might decide at any point that they're not "getting enough value" and relicense to terms that don't work for me, thus causing me to need to either live with the software as is, no bugfixes or new features, or rework it out of my architecture.
Isn’t one of the core ideals of FOSS forking? If you’re certain that no other person could possibly fork a piece of software and provide bug fixes and new features, isn’t that a tacit admission that the primary maintainer is the only person on earth that could do so?
If I were the only person on earth that could write a bit of software, I would not do that for free. It would be downright weird and entitled to expect that from me.
If I wasn’t the only person on earth that could write such code, I would happily watch and encourage the people that prefer to have an Apache 2.0 licensed derivative of the original work.
Akka devs are 100% within their rights to set the terms of use for their product and thus their work. There was no bait and switch here. This is just how licensing works.
Use a copyleft-licensed project with outside contributors if you want the project to stay free.
Rather look at how many organizations are paying for contributions. If it's all resting on a single back there's increased danger.
Still, the only way to guarantee continued development is paying for it (or doing it yourself).
If you have all the information about the pricing model up front you can make good decisions about using the software or not. If the pricing model changes your decisions can get invalidates and might require serious effort to remove the dependency on that piece of software.
It's bait and switch, and nobody likes that. They used a true open source license, earning them developer good will, until it stopped serving their purposes. It also undermines open source as a concept.
> Sadly, open source is prone to the infamous “Tragedy of the commons”, [...] This situation is not sustainable and one in which everyone eventually loses.
> So what does sustainable open source look like? I believe it’s where everyone—users and developers—contributes and are in it together, sharing accountability and ownership.
> This means that companies using the software for profit need to give something back, either code, documentation, community work, or money. In sustainable open source, participants feel the need and moral obligation to contribute.
They even go so far to say they believe BSL to be Open Source, which means they fundamentally misunderstand the idea behind Open Source:
> We believe the BSL 1.1 with our open source grants and Apache re-license is a form of productive and sustainable open source.
They also seem to not know of any big Apache projects that are sustainable, even though there are many examples out in the wild. Apparently none of those projects are sustainable, just because Lightbend didn't manage to actually get major contributors to their own project?
> Apache 2.0 is a very liberal license well suited for early, small open source projects establishing community.
> With Akka now considered critical infrastructure for many large organizations, the Apache 2.0 model becomes increasingly risky when a small company solely carries the maintenance effort.
Just because you didn't manage to build a company around a Open Source library/ecosystem, doesn't mean Open Source is not sustainable. It just means that your company is not sustainable. But I guess it's hard to blame yourself when you see others using your code without paying for it.
After 3 years since release the code automatically gets relicensed under Apache 2.0 and becomes open source. This is a nice provision that prevents the code from being completely lost if the company loses interest in it.
To me it reads like they chose to switch to a proprietary license but don't want to be subjected to the natural consequences of betraying the trust of their userbase.
I've seen companies claiming "but you can use our buggy unsecure code after 3 years" but reality I'm yet to see actually anyone using this with BSL software.
This almost religious attitude makes no sense to me. Clearly other’s use of that code wasn’t very sustainable, since the author now says they will no longer maintain it for free. You’re essentially describing the “everyone looses” outcome that the OP wants to address, but you seem to think it’s a good outcome.
Plenty of big Apache projects have major contributors from multiple projects/ecosystems/companies, without having to change the license to something not Apache. Since it's clearly possible to have sustainable projects licensed under Apache, I'm saying that it sounds more like an excuse rather than a proper argument for the license change.
How many of these would have to opt for this source available approach before Akka would no longer be sustainable?
You are not entitled to ongoing, continued maintenance of any FLOSS project. If you have such needs, you can get paid support or fork the project and maintain it yourself.
I disagree with the idea that the only correct definition of open source is the one that favors big tech monopolists.
Times have changed compared to when the open source movement started. Not many people would have imagined that the monopolists would weaponize open source like they do now. They are not the first company to adapt their license to the changing circumstances, see Elastic.
What do you think "weaponize open source" means? It doesn't look like it means a thing, and lounds like a poor attempt at shoehorning "weapon" in a discussion on how a potential user's income is something noteworthy.
Open Source is established term which offers specific freedoms which brings specific benefits (and challenges) to businesses.
While many Venture funded companies might want you to believe they are being unfairly taken advantage by the clouds it is not the full story.
Elastic for example relies on A LOT of code contributed by community, which were contributing because they could use end result under Open Source License.
Elastic changing the license changed relations here to you contribute to create the product BUT you do not get all the rights to use it any more.
In Elastic case in particular large number of cloud solutions were build which embed their solution (arguably same as Elastic embedds Lucene) who could not use Elastic after license change.
At the current price tag (USD $1995/core), Akka would have been prohibitively expensive. Akka pricing does not make sense for OEMs.
Luckily, other features were always more prioritary than moving to Akka, otherwise we'd be in trouble.
While I understand that open source developers also need to make money, I do not think this mode of operation is my favorite. When a programming language / library / tool takes on VC money it is just inevitable that they will need a mode of revenue in the near future and this is one way to do it.
Anyways, between this and the Scala 2 -> 3 migration, I do not think I would recommend Scala to anyone now or touch it myself.
IMO Scala still is a great functional alternative to Java. But this narrative you're laying out here is misrepresenting the reality. It's true Akka was a good way to get Scala adoption, but that stopped being the case a long time ago. Today, despite being still a bit niche, Scala has many other big Scala projects and frameworks that hold its weight.
And, by the way, the Scala 2 -> 3 migration is being wonderfully executed, as it's been designed. No other high level language at this point promises the same set of binary compatibility (even across 2.13 and Scala 3) as Scala does, e.g. it's much better than Java, Python, Rust, etc.
One important change coming with Scala 3 is precisely that its future doesn't depend on Lightbend's financial success anymore.
Definitely. I remember some of us Scala early adopters being concerned about the nonsensical name change, and being assured by others that nothing fundamental was being changed, that Lightbend was "a more user friendly name than TypeSafe" (as if the notion of type-safety was a barrier to entry for goddamn Scala, for crying out loud).
Seems we skeptics were proven right.
My alarm bells were ringing as far back as that name change. Everyone I knew who used Scala thought the name change was silly and foreboding of bad things. "TypeSafe" has a nice, technical ring to it, and it embodied what we thought Scala was all about.
Now, "Lightbend". Talk about a fluffy, meaningless, VC-friendly name. It sounded ominously wrong back then. I guess we skeptics were proven right after all these years...
Like, when somebody releases something open source, then notice that they can actually make money out of it and they change the license at the last minute. Oh the hypocrisy.
Seriously if you're bothered by people making money out of your product, keep it closed source, nothing wrong with it. On the contrary a plague of the latest years is this pressure that everything should be open source: it doesn't need to. If you're not comfortable with it, keep it closed source.
But if you decide to open source something, keep your promises, no matter what.
Presumably all older versions of the software that were Apache licensed remain so. They are switching to BSL (closed, but source available and each revision switches to Apache licensed 3 years later) going forward.
I don't see how this is worse than keeping everything closed source from the start, which is your suggestion? Shouldn't we be thankful for all the work they've done so far for free, and if somebody doesn't like the new licensing model, then they can fork it from the last Apache-licensed version and keep going from there?
This is after 13 years of support not "last minute".
I don't understand the sentiment of "once something is OSS, it has to be so forever". They owe you what exactly? More of their free time & money to hold up something you call a "promise" but is just their choice of license made many years ago?
They are being reasonable about it, you still get the source, you can still use it for free on a revenue < $25M. Companies making significant amounts of money now have to pay for it, instead of freeloading.
Its fine to spend your nights and weekends on passions projects when your young, its also fine to demand money for shouldering much of its development when said project grows large many years later and you have obligations towards your family. Its called being an adult.
If I contributed to the project, I did so under the premise of the LICENSE that was active when I contributed. If I didn't like OSS, I wouldn't have contributed to a OSS project. Them changing the license is a middle-finger to me as a contributor.
> Its fine to spend your nights and weekends on passions projects when your young [...] Its called being an adult
With all due respect, fuck you. Equaling "open source" to "young people can waste their time" and "software needs to earn money" to being an adult is a really shitty opinion to put out there.
Me (40+ years old) and many others do open source because we want the world to be about more than just money. Just because you cannot understand that nor want the same thing, doesn't mean that we're wrong and you're right.
can a business strategy align with some version of the greater good?
how much alignment is needed?
Libraries generally never have "annual revenues more than US $25m", so it should be free for them to use the code as well.
Realistically though, they force you to contact them to get a "Additional Use Grant" in case you want to use Akka for other open source projects:
> I use Akka for an OSS project. What does this mean for my project?
> The license offers a customizable “Additional Use Grant” that grants production usage for other OSS projects including Play Framework.
> If you are running an OSS project using Akka, please contact us at akka-license@lightbend.com and we will do our best to continue to support your project.
I wish them luck on their endeavour, but I know what I'd do if I was building a OSS project needing distributed actors, and it's not to send them an email asking if I could please use their software.
So Apache projects depending on Akka, like Flink or Spark, will probably have to fork it or be stuck on the current version.
Akka is a part of Play though, which has been abandoned by Lightbend.
If someone decide to make some useful project opensource. Full respect. If they changed their mind later to make the project proprietary, still full respect. It's like some kind neighbour decides to clean the street for free because it makes the neighbourhood cleaner for everyone. We are not in position to demand the status quo but be grateful of.
There are many projects I would happily pay for. Nginx, zeromq, django, react, elasticsearch, to name a few.
What really happens is:
1) Project is open source
2) People use the project because it is open source
3) People contribute bug reports and fixes, creating value and improving the open source project because it is open source
4) People spread the word about the project, free marketing because it is open source
5) Maintainers decide to relicense, privatizing the value created by the community.
The "success" was a social phenomenon, not merely the efforts of the maintainers.
Relicensing is a betrayal of the community that was built around the software.
> Akka requires significant investment in order to maintain its position as a preeminent distributed systems runtime. Many organizations have adopted Akka and are seeing significant benefits for their organizations.
> However, in recent years an increasing number of those organizations have elected to self-support without either contributing back to the community or by investing in annual subscriptions. We have an ambitious roadmap for the future of Akka and require a way to fund and sustain that development.
> We believe that larger organizations that are seeing business benefits from Akka should contribute to the ongoing health and evolution of the project.
They need money to continue development, and the current model isn't generating enough revenue for them to stay in business.
I am grateful that open source projects exist. But their "turning around" doesn't make me less grateful.
When I see open source projects getting relicensed, I automatically assume there is some monetization campaign underway which exploits the community's contributions.
If "they" doesn't include all previous contributors, I can see an argument to the contrary.
I think that makes this change worse, though: it means that the new license will infect many more projects--like Spark, for example. And they won't even be making security patches to existing versions available under the old license. "Nice project you got there, it'd sure be a shame if some unpatched security flaw came along and ruined it," they're saying.
edit: I wasn't aware, but Spark stopped using akka several years ago. But the basic point still stands.
Yes, it's pretty clear they no longer want to participate in the Open Source ecosystem, as allowing people to run the software however you see fit is a integral part of Open Source, together with being able to modify and reshare said software.
> allowing people to run the software however you see fit is a integral part of Open Source
Does that depend on whether you consider corporations to be people?
Free money and labor for Amazon ecosystem.
Honestly I'd love to see a license that was "Apache for everyone but Amazon (or other $100B+ companies and their subsidiaries)"
Open source is being weaponized in ways that Stallman never predicted.
I wonder if this will push people there (please go to F#) or Elixir and Erlang.
1. We're still porting features that are all licensed under Apache 2.0, as other comments have mentioned. 2. None of Akka.NET's source code has been authored by Lightbend and we certainly don't fall under their Contributor License Agreement (CLA.)
The copyright headers of the Akka.NET files includes a Lightbend attribution currently, but we've included that in there largely out of an abundance of caution - and it's actually a little erroneous for us to do that since many of the files in our projects don't exist in the original Akka source.
Our source was contributed to the .NET Foundation years ago - so I'll ask their OSS counsel if there's anything we need to do differently going forward to keep our source germane under Apache 2.0.
This will make it more difficult to catch up however, as the JVM version and code is obviously used as a starting point for bringing functionality over. The main part of it I can think of that was home-grown was the original Akka.Net Split brain resolver, but once light bend open sourced theirs, the project ported that over anyway.
First, if you're running it on an 8-core server, that's $16k per year, which is about what many companies are paying for an enterprise support contract. It's not much when you consider that it gives you access to Akka engineers at the cost of 1/10 of an FTE.
Second, the $2k number is a list price. All large enterprise deals are negotiated, and nearly all are discounted from the list price. Akka probably won't discount small deals, but they'll be forced to discount larger ones if the buyer has an alternative. Plus, the buyer will demand SLAs, dedicated support, and will often demand changes to the license and custom work on the software itself (tweaks to make it work with X, etc.)
Akka and their larger customers will make it work. The purpose of this license change is to give Akka the ability to get their customers to the table in the first place.
Which is exactly why this is so unreasonable. The minimum spend for the "standard" license is 40 cores -- which means you're paying at least $80k/yr for a support contract which won't even assign you an account manager or guarantee a response any faster than "4 business days" (yes, really). And as you scale up, it only gets more expensive, and you don't get anything more for your money.
Furthermore, most people here (as usual) seem to be completely ignorant about what Akka is. The vast majority of Akka users only ever interact with Akka through other libraries that depend on it: Akka-HTTP, Akka-Streams, Alpakka Connectors, etc. Hardly anyone actually uses Akka actors directly, the Akka Cluster platform or recently implemented distributed programming features (like Akka persistence) that makes up the business model of Lightbend. It's essentially a runtime system; an implementation detail. It's no surprise that none of these users ever make contributions back to a software that is so far removed from business code.
Most folks here don't seem to grasp the cost of most enterprise software, Oracle has been charging 10x this for decades now.
https://www.oracle.com/assets/technology-price-list-070617.p...
And hiring a consultant for few months to fix your performance problems is also a hell lot cheaper than paying that much per core, forever.
> Akka and their larger customers will make it work. The purpose of this license change is to give Akka the ability to get their customers to the table in the first place.
Translation: They depend on our software enough that the rewrite is no alternative, they don't have enough onboard talent to fork it, and they have enough money to pay the price.
I mean, what if I contributed to the project back when it was Apache licensed, in good faith that my changes would be freely available (as in free beer)? Now they decide that they ask money for something that includes my contribution? Don't they have to ask for the contributors permissions to be able to do that?
(Just a hypothetical example, I am not an Akka contributor.)
Of course, they can't un-license code that they've already released, but they can re-release the old code under a new license, and ship all new code under that new license going forward.
In my humble opinion, Akka is becoming less relevant in Scala community. I don't see new projects picking it up as there are better alternatives.
From what I have encountered: Akka was mostly used as Http server (akka-http). There is Http4s which can replace that and I think is great. Also its easy to use it with tagless final or zio's IO.
Actors computation model depending on use case can be replaced with message brokers or Scala libraries. Like cats-effect or zio for composable concurrency primitives and fs2/zio-streams for stream computations. I know there are actor use cases beyond that, but I am yet to encounter project these days where picking akka would be my first choice.
I have nothing against akka and I definitely enjoyed developing with it 5 years ago.
So there is Loom comig from one side, and effect libraries like cats and zio from the other side... great promises, but would I trust them with production code?... Hmmm...
But there is always the option to lean back on Java and Spring and JEE - the old and boring but tried and tested ways on the JVM.
Hopefully someone starts a copyleft fork of the last FOSS version of Akka and drives Lightbend out of business with it.
No it isn't. Releases of Ghostscript are entirely FOSS from day 1. There's a huge difference between a FOSS project that sells exceptions, and a proprietary program that businesses have to buy a license for to use it all.
I.e. it's not free anymore. That's what the title should say, instead we get an history lesson.
History lessons are always weird in these kind of announcements, but I think this one isn't that bad or deceptive in its approach.
Can anyone name a recent open source library or program that is widely used and community controlled beside Linux?
Open source now mainly serves as a way for trillion dollar companies to pool resources to develop software they all need and minimize how many developers they need to hire (see Linux).
We have seen again and again how open source developers and maintainers are giving the short end of the stick and have seen over and over again companies try to have make an open source business model and fail. RedHat is basically the exception that proves the rule.
I don't see any problem with that as long as the companies are paying the developers, which they are in most cases. Major open source like Linux and k8s haven't been developed by volunteers for decades.
I'd answer the opposite question. What do I use in my daily work that isn't open source? Sure there's binary blobs/drivers here and there, and whatever the cloud providers are keeping to themselves.
But c'mon, all the languages, the build tools, web frameworks, libraries, databases (sql and non-sql).
"FOSS is just not a good business model. But when making decisions about what libraries to use, or where to invest my time, such concerns are simply not my problem."
and:
"It’s morally wrong to make the product popular, by advertising it as Open Source / Free Software, and then doing a reversal later."
If their business model isn't your problem, then what you think about their license isn't their problem.
The problem is not the license but the switch of it after they benefited from being Open Source
Sure, there are probably businesses out there whose entire livelihood is built on akka, and I get that the creators might be upset that they're not contributing to the project. But there are a lot of other businesses out there where this might be a great solution for a very small part of the problem space, and they are just never going to use this tech now. A few years ago I used akka at my current gig for a project that ended up fizzling, and had always hoped to re-introduce it if another appropriate opportunity emerged. This change makes that a non-starter.
I also think this is a big blow in terms of the future of computing. The actor model is so useful, and it's taken so long to come close to mainstream. And now the biggest implementation shoves a giant stick in its own spoke.
You can fork the current version, that's the whole idea of Open Source. But you cannot take away the rights of the AKKA team to create their commercial "fork" either. That much was clear from the beginning I assume. License does what it says it does, it doesn't give you free access to all future forks.
AKKA coming out with a commercial license does not make things worse for you, you can keep on using what you have under the license terms attached to it.
Imagine if AKKA STOPPED making any software. Would that be morally wrong? They are not doing that but they will be providing more software with a different license. Take it or leave it, or fork the existing version with the same license. Ah the beauty of Open Source.
> AKKA coming out with a commercial license does not make things worse for you
If I had invested my career in becoming an advocate for their product I'd now be worse off. It can't be introduced without going through legal and procurement. I can't take it home and build a small business without wondering what next year's pricing model will be.
I hope Akka's owners succeed. I also hope none of the tools I invest my time learning and introducing at work do this.
Basically, anything containing Akka at those new versions cannot be used without breaking Akka license.
The problem with what’s happening is that for software in Scala, as soon as I see Akka anywhere in my dependencies, I have to assume license violation. Of course, I can check if that particular dependency has a grant. But will there be a formal method to validate this? Will automated license scanners be able to infer this?
Another point… what does the grant actually imply. Is there some sort of way a product with Akka-dependent dependency supposed to be used? Will people be able to work around BSL by pulling in a dependency that brings Akka in just as a mechanism to sneak Akka itself in? That would be a silly oversight by Lightbend[1]
[1] the faq answers this: “ I am using Play and parts of Akka that are included with Play? If you are using Play and are directly using Akka components as part of your implementation you will be required to have a license for production use.”
As someone who came to Scala from Erlang and adopted Scala because of Akka, … it’s disappointing. Fortunately alternatives exist and hopefully someone will adapt them for Scala. Here’s one: http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/quasar/. This is used by Clojure’s Pulsar Erlang-influenced actors. For me, this is the end of the road for Akka in any future Scala code. It’s a shame because the technology is great. However, maintenance is going to become a hassle.
From an observer’s perspective: Typesafe, later Lightbend, never managed to find a great fit for themselves. They always kept developing Akka and promote Akka-based systems like all the alpakka stuff, http, streams. People used it because it was Apache 2.0. Now, everyone who uses Akka, and wants to continue using it, has a liability on their hands. What about all contributions submitted under the old license? The FAQ doesn’t specify if existing code will be BSL and convert to Apache 2.0 in 3 years (or maybe more, faq says each version may have its own convert date…), or only new code will be BSL. Depending on the answer, some contributors may feel a bit let down: https://github.com/akka/alpakka/graphs/contributors?from=201.... They all contributed under Apache 2.0.
So many questions, it’s a minefield. In my head, this is a minefield worse that AGPL. Their faq says a company with a revenue below USD25m/annum receives a free license. What if said company sells to a USD100m business and is using Akka indirectly? Forget about direct, explicit use. What if a product uses stuff indirectly?
However, it's quite telling that the new blogpost discusses the new pricing but never actually shares the pricing, but only shares the condition for when it's free (as in gratis). Do lightbend themselves think its expensive?
https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/typesafe-series-d--...
post-reading: ...probably
Now, Akka came out at the right time and deserved to get popular. It's built on a solid and battle-tested foundation and there is a real community-driven ecosystem around it, or at least there was. It totally made sense. Also Lightbend was on a seemingly good trajectory, and Akka looked like a safe bet.
I guarantee there are small teams out there, at big companies making well over $25m, who are probably overstretched already and now need to plan an unexpected migration. I love Scala but the maintenance burden is real.
One issue with the BSL is that old versions of the software are open source. So, with this change, you can still use a 3 year old version of Akka for free. Does akka change rapidly enough these days to justify the price?
Stories like this one make me nervous about choosing the wrong one. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, there is no putting it back in. You can change the license for future versions, but some big company has the right to fork your code at that point and bury you with their superior resources.
How do you choose a good license without shooting yourself in the foot?
That is not very reassuring advice for a small developer who has limited resources. By opening your source code, you have just given up any head start you might have over the competition. They now have access to every line of code you spent hours agonizing over to get it right. Now they can out market you and leverage their vast resources to steal away any of your potential customers.
Letting my actor's function block was the best bit about Erlang.
Imagine a contributor who's first contribution to Open Source was this project. I am not sure he'd be very happy about a move such as this (or maybe he won't care).
I don't care to debate open source or license changes, I care mostly about the developers this affects. I care about the people who I got excited about using the actor model with Akka now having to put in a serious amount of effort to rip it out. Mostly these people are at places I no longer work and just inherited codebases where akka happened to win the particular decision on the project. In most of those projects, it could just as easily have been Spring, or Dropwizard, or Kafka Streams, or dozens of other libraries and frameworks.
For those of you who work for companies that don't have over $25m in revenue, please never choose Akka. A company looking to acquire your company is going to do their due diligence looking for poison pills, and Akka became one of those today. For those of you who work for companies making over $25m in revenue, you probably know that the way scaling works, your company is very likely to have a loss rather than a profit. You're also likely to have lots of people in accounting, and requisition, and many levels of management, and not a single one of them will ever consider $2k per vCPU for even a second.
Most companies that have that much revenue are building on pretty rough margins that have gotten a lot rougher this year, and the expectation from the market is to start showing a profit right away. Many companies are finding smaller margins at the same time, and working with a scale of many tens of thousands of vCPUs running in cloud environments, earning only a small amount above the opEx (or maybe even below) of the cloud bill.
These companies are also likely to have to follow regulations like SOC2 or SOX, and have requirements for patching CVEs, so it isn't an option to just keep the same version of Akka once a CVE has been discovered. This is particularly true if you're using akka-http as those servers might be handling traffic that isn't even going through a WAF. Developers in this situation are going to be absolutely screwed. There's no way the company will justify a license that costs more than the physical hardware something is running on, but there is no way they can just not upgrade, either. Maybe the company decides that it'll license, and only have to lay off 50 people as a result. Maybe the company decides it'll fork and 5 people have to maintain that fork until the company can migrate to something else. I know if I were one of those people, I'd quit. I think the best scenario here is to just drop everything you were doing, and either rewrite your akka components or try to swap in something like ZIO and hope you can complete the project before a big CVE hits.
And if a >8 CVE does hit Akka soon, maybe that would be a good thing, as it might foster the creation of one particular fork that could actually gain traction, rather than a diffuse set of hundreds of forks that never gain critical mass.
Enterprises have to be sustainable. If you're furious with Lightbend for making this change to protect their bottom line, then you can always fork one of the last open source versions and maintain/fix that yourself. But most people won't do that, because if they did they'd likely have been active contributors to the project before now, reducing the ongoing maintenance burden on Lightbend and potentially avoiding them feeling the need to close-source in the first place.
I don’t mind paying for good software, but too many companies abuse their market position once they get big.
Not a bad thing per se, by the way…
For example, is akka-http [0] part of these changes?
The same thing has happened several times, especially in the database space. Use the "fake open source" strategy to lure developers and then bait and switch. It's good business, but disingenuous. They remove a core implied premise, akin to a lie. If they were upfront from the beginning regarding eventually cashing in with heavy fees or cutting off contributions, community, etc, then it would be a very different case and there would have been no deception. This is deception.
We were fortunate to have a strong business model around our healthcare management operations that had nothing to do with the EMR but if I had to do it again speaking from a business standpoint only, I don't think I would do it as open source that way. As recently as 5 years ago open source was viewed with extreme suspicioun if not outright disdain in the largest health institutions, I think that is changing but still has 10-15 years to go.
Yet lets be real and call things the way they are - you decided what Open Source is not right business license for your project and choosing to use Proprietary (Source Available) license instead.
i can think of a few companies whose total spend with this license would justify a two pizza team to maintain a fork of akka or replace it outright.
What I realized is that there are two groups of people here.
One group considers Open Source a religion. The other thinks of it as business.
The "religion" folks liken Open Source to the work of saints and prophets. The creators of Open Source do it because they love the work and helping people. And it's not cool if they stop being saints one day, much like the actual religious people wouldn't like seeing their icons turn into something else.
The "business" bunch say there's freedom in Open Source to change anything on a dime, including for money. The fact you offered software as an Open Source is a strategy, and no matter how much it helped and how many people and for how long, you absolutely have the right to nail them one morning.
What I would say here is this:
Open Source was a reaction to actions of Giants, like Microsoft, Oracle and others. That's all it was. It was the Software Woodstock, which then turned into goo and spilled everywhere. Now, we're all snickering and crying from joy in the back of our heads whenever we get some cool piece of Open Source software. It's like God granting wishes.
And nowadays, Open Source is a big business with the currency made of influence and worship of followers. And just like real religion, there's a hat on a pew where money somehow shows up every Sunday, at least for those whose gospel greases the wheels of commerce.
That said, it's high time to at least acknowledge this, rather than endlessly wax philosophical about the Soul of Open Source.
And what about the millions who labor in and around Open Source, and don't even get recognition? They count on Divine Accounting to give them their fair share back one day. But they're getting restless.
So in short, Software Woodstock has turned into What The Hell Is This. But it's just Religion and Business, all wrapped together.
And with ominous clouds of resource scarcity, inflation and geopolitics from hell, it will soon turn into Check Please! Time to separate Religion from Business. It's all Business, folks!
"the Apache 2.0 model becomes increasingly risky when a small company solely carries the maintenance effort". Really? Then why are you reverting to that licence after 3 years?
Other projects changing the licence have at least spelled it out honestly: Cloud companies like Amazon are seen as parasitic and the developers of highly successful open source projects want a slice of the pie.
I mean, it came so suddenly that you literally have no choice than to pay for at least 1 year, before you port your services to something else (if you can, at all), unless you want CVEs going wild in your production systems.
I wonder what's their long-term vision? Getting rid of Akka as the main business model (subscriptions / support) and focus on something that is maybe based on Akka (I guess Kalix and similar cloud-only services)?
Well, if that's the case, it's a brilliant idea: squeeze as much money now as you can, pivot your company to something different. (SAAS, yay, another one)
Unethical? Maybe yes, a tiny bit.
- I will be excited to see if a new jvm actor system emerges as a competitor. Or perhaps a fork.
- I would be excited to see more consideration given to Elixir and OTP, where previously Akka may have been favored.
NC covered works trick people into investing in a dead end.
They can do that, for sure. It is legal and I don’t see reason to complain. You cannot trust a project to stay free if it is licensed without copyleft or requesting that you assign them your code without guaranteeing that it stays free.
As it happens, everyone doing free beer software at the kolkhoz isn't sustainable.
Thanks video
