Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Are Changing the License for Akka

lightbend.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 360 posts

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#81

Post by tkfu »

chsreekar wrote: post #13

It's not just about revenue generation. I bet they are doing this to prevent Amazon from deploying a version of Akka as a service on AWS.

This doesn't really make sense. Akka is a framework/library, not something that could be offered as a service, anymore than you could have "boost as a service" or "numpy as a service".

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.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#82

Post by KingOfCoders »

bb1298 wrote: post #45

The commercial license is $2k per vCPU LMAO, aka an 8 core node would cost $16k annually to operate. This is about to be an absolute shit storm, don’t see how this will make a lick of financial sense for corporations to pay this.

I have limited experience, but had some licensing costs in my budget over the years, and $2k/vCPU seems to be at the lower end of such systems. The lever some companies pull is to let you pay for test and developer systems. Then $2k/vCPU gets expensive very fast (from another comment it sounds that you only pay for production systems).

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#83

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

capableweb wrote: post #25
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if you decide to open source something, keep your promises, no matter what. 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…

> I don't understand the sentiment of "once something is OSS, it has to be so forever". They owe you what exactly? 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…

[flagged]

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#84

Post by capableweb »

avalys wrote: post #61
capableweb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand the sentiment of "once something is OSS, it has to be so forever". They owe you what exactly? 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…

You contributed under the Apache “LICENSE”, which allows them to do exactly what they did. This is hardly a subtle detail, it’s one of the major characteristics of the Apache license. If you did not like this, you could have chosen to only contribute to projects whose licenses do not permit this, e.g. those licensed under GPL. Were you unaware of this?

Of course they are allowed to change the license to whatever they want, or start adding bugs on purpose to the software if they so wish, anything is possible with the various copyleft licenses.

It's legal, yes. If it's nice towards contributors of past versions, is another thing.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#85

Post by arinlen »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #68
braingenious wrote: post #35

I’ve never quite understood the amount of rancor that changes like this elicit here. It seems like people come out of the woodworks acting like they have been personally affronted by this, or that this is somehow directly affecting their lives. 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 licens…

I was once working for a company who had stellar growth to $100M+ revenue and millions of users, started with a "open source" framework for distributed caching, needed to buy the enterprise version for support, the vendor got bought up by a large evil enterprise and the licensing costs got 10x without pre-warning, and it was a very complicated task to get that core technology pulled (mostly because it was too complic…

> I would be very careful to use "open source" technology from companies that depend on sales from this piece of technology.

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.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#87

Post by ArneBab »

it’s basically a cc by-nc? https://www.draketo.de/light/english/politics/free-culture-d...

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.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#88

Post by KingOfCoders »

nine_k wrote: post #42
capableweb wrote: post #14

It seems like Lightbend have decided themselves to redefine what "Open Source" means for them, a slight warning sign of whats to come. > 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 to…

I think they clearly state that the fresh versions are not open source, they are "source available". 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.

From my perspective the challenge is, what happens if there is a critical bug found after 3 years and you're on the Apache version? Do they backport the fix (out of kindness)? I've jumped through many hoops in the past to pay for fixes to older open source systems - because the systems weren't properly updated - to get a patch, and it was never easy (and fixing this yourself is nearly impossible if the bug isn't obvious, and you don't want to break things in such a core technology).

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#89

Post by ArneBab »

braingenious wrote: post #35

I’ve never quite understood the amount of rancor that changes like this elicit here. It seems like people come out of the woodworks acting like they have been personally affronted by this, or that this is somehow directly affecting their lives. 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 licens…

I think people don’t take the license of projects they use seriously. The license allows such relicensing.

Use a copyleft-licensed project with outside contributors if you want the project to stay free.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#90

Post by capableweb »

bjornsing wrote: post #80
capableweb wrote: post #14

It seems like Lightbend have decided themselves to redefine what "Open Source" means for them, a slight warning sign of whats to come. > 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 to…

> 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. This almost religious attitude makes no sense to me. Clearly other’s use of that code wasn’t very sustainable, since the author now…

The author is saying "we're the only major contributor to Akka, open source isn't sustainable!" without considering/trying to address why they are the only major contributor to Akka.

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.

Post reply on HN