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We Are Changing the License for Akka

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Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#101

Post by cardanome »

arinlen wrote: post #69
cardanome wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is open source for me as I will never earn more than US $25 million in annual revenue. If I ever do, I will gladly pay them. 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. T…

> Not many people would have imagined that the monopolists would weaponize open source like they do now. 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.

Companies like Amazon offering open source software as a hosting service can out-compete any other companies offering the same just based on market position.

Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. All things being equal, they can always crush the competition with their market position.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#102

Post by hobofan »

capableweb wrote: post #90
bjornsing wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Apac…

> Since it's clearly possible to have sustainable projects licensed under Apache

Just because it's possible for _some_ projects to live sustainable and be licensed under Apache, doesn't mean that it's possible for all projects to be developed sustainably under that license.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#103

Post by [deleted] »

bb1298 wrote: post #77
threeseed wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that they are targeting enterprise customers. And for them the price is irrelevant if it solves their problem.

How is it irrelevant? Operating a single node would be $10k+ per year. That makes no sense for a large corporation to adopt. They’re better off rewriting the entirety of Akka.

[deleted]

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#105

Post by TAForObvReasons »

kryptiskt wrote: post #67
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…

Bait and switch is never nice, whether Google does it or putative open source projects. A lot of developers work for companies that has more than $25M in revenue, and now a ton of them is going to get shit from management because they added this cuckoo egg dependency back when it used an open source license. I have no problem with companies using whatever license, I do have trouble with them getting traction being op…

It's funny to see how HN flipped on this subject. My company was stung by Handsontable switching to a proprietary license https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488642 and the top comment back in 2019 was "Great to hear".

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#106

Post by arinlen »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #95
arinlen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I've used many open source projects in the past, several of them had critical bugs, that did not get fixed (e.g. either the core developer abandoned it, or the BDFL said WONTFIX). A software without someone fixing the problems is - YMMV - too risky to use. And fixing a bug on your own in something complex and complicated like Akka without breaking things is no easy task (essentially creating and maintaining your own…

> I've used many open source projects in the past, several of them had critical bugs, that did not get fixed (...)

And that's perfectly fine. FLOSS assures you have access to the source code so that you can dig in and fix any issue you feel strongly about.

What FLOSS does not grant you is a right to demand maintenance and unpaid work from third parties.

If your view on FLOSS is so militant about the right to maintenance,you should also be mindful of the fact that it's you and people like you who are expected to do said maintenance.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#107

Post by KingOfCoders »

pas wrote: post #99
KingOfCoders wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Like, when somebody releases something open source," ... to get traction and own the market (and sometimes, don't know here, get free work) as a business strategy, not for the greater good.

what's the greater good anyway? back to nomadic live off the land no money no capitalism? can a business strategy align with some version of the greater good? how much alignment is needed?

No alignment is needed. The referral to "Tragedy of the commons" [1] makes it sound as the primary goal of open sourcing was the common good.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#108

Post by braingenious »

ramchip wrote: post #65
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…

It's a problem for people who use Akka already, not those who won't adopt it. The choices are to rewrite the service, pay a massive licensing cost ($2k _per core_!), or live with 3-year old releases with no security updates. It's very disruptive.

This is where I’m confused. Are the average current users of Akka making more than $25 million in revenue? Or is the average Akka user on track to hit $25 million before they can figure out costs or other options?

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#109

Post by dwaite »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #30
echelon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open Source ecosystem 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.

That's more or less what SSPL is. The problem is the OSI and FSF are basically religious pharisees, so dedicated to their texts, they're missing the actual point . People backing the OSI/Amazon over Elastic/Mongo/etc. are literally killing open source.

> People backing the OSI/Amazon over Elastic/Mongo/etc. are literally killing open source.

AGPL, the license Mongo was originally under, isn't used in reality to prevent deployed applications from hoarding changes; rather, it used to scare commercial entities away from deploying your code. With a commercial CLA providing exclusive code ownership, it allows you a legal club to block others, even other contributors, from competing against your current business interests.

It is licenses like the AGPL and commercial CLAs which have been killing open source and free software, because they destroy motivation for any significant third party contributions and the resulting emergent ecosystem around a project. It reduces the idea of open source and of free software down a lot closer (in my opinion) to source code escrow.

MongoDB didn't want any Amazon changes to be contributed to the project. They wanted to block another commercial entity from offering a service based on their IP. From an open source perspective, I don't take their side any more than I would take Amazon's.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#110

Post by KingOfCoders »

arinlen wrote: post #106
KingOfCoders wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used many open source projects in the past, several of them had critical bugs, that did not get fixed (e.g. either the core developer abandoned it, or the BDFL said WONTFIX). A software without someone fixing the problems is - YMMV - too risky to use. And fixing a bug on your own in something complex and complicated like Akka without breaking things is no easy task (essentially creating and maintaining your own…

> I've used many open source projects in the past, several of them had critical bugs, that did not get fixed (...) And that's perfectly fine. FLOSS assures you have access to the source code so that you can dig in and fix any issue you feel strongly about. What FLOSS does not grant you is a right to demand maintenance and unpaid work from third parties. If your view on FLOSS is so militant about the right to maintena…

"If your view on FLOSS is so militant about the right to maintenance"

No it isn't, and I've never said so. I've created several open source projects which got quite successful without taking money or the intention of taking money and gave maintainance as I saw fit.

"so that you can dig in and fix any issue you feel strongly about."

Trying to fix critical bugs twice, because their was no support, without being able to fix them, I think this often is delusional. Even finding people to pay willing to fix such bugs is a challenge (but we did pay several $10k to people for fixing bugs). But as I've said, YMMV and you might have been able to fix critical bugs in something like the storage backend of MySQL, I probably can't without breaking things.

There is a difference between fixing a missed edge case in a date formatting library or a race condition in a MySQL backend.

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