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We Are Changing the License for Akka

lightbend.com

1–10 of 360 posts

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#6
post #2

> Production use of the software requires a commercial license from Lightbend I.e. it's not free anymore. That's what the title should say, instead we get an history lesson.

The license change is prominent in the title, even if digging into the exact price and terms part comes a few paragraphs down.

History lessons are always weird in these kind of announcements, but I think this one isn't that bad or deceptive in its approach.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#7
post #4

2000 USD per core per year. https://www.lightbend.com/akka

$2000 USD for companies earning more than $25M USD Revenue per year.

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?

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#8

tl;dr: It's changing from the Apache License, which is FOSS, to the Business Source License, which is neither free nor open source. Hopefully someone starts a copyleft fork of the last FOSS version of Akka and drives Lightbend out of business with it.

To be fair, after 3 years it reverts to the Apache License. I don't think there is much reason for a fork. It is like Ghostscript has always done. I can understand the change might feel a bit sour, but wanting to drive them out of business is a bit much I think. Also, this software sounds like it is mostly used by big companies, they can pay up to keep this software going.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#10
I hope this works out well for them.

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?

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