I wonder if this is mainly aimed at Java Akka use. 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.
What are the alternatives?
We Are Changing the License for Akka
121–130 of 360 posts
Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka
#122It 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…
> 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 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.
Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka
#123Earlier 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.
The cloud giants have gigantic moats in terms of infrastructure, marketing, process, and so on.
Traditionally, one of the best paths for an upstart company to challenge an established giant was to develop superior technology. Indeed, this is how some of the cloud giants themselves got their start against the dinosaurs of the day.
But in a tech culture where open source is not just common but expected, this path is severely hampered. A lot of tech users won't even consider your fancy new technology if it isn't open source, but if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs.
This is what "Microsoft loves open source" means. When they had the (commercially) superior tech, they disparaged open source as nonsense so they wouldn't be asked to share. Twenty years later, when they realized that there was more and better tech out there than they could hope to produce, they aligned and supported that very ideology so that "we have Redis" or "we have Akka" wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore.
Ultimately, it's a twist on the old "commodify your competition".
Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> doesn't mean that it's possible for all projects to be developed sustainably under that license
Absolutely, I agree with that, it doesn't give you the right to be sustainable, merely the chance.
What I find weird is claiming that Akka is unsustainable because it's open source, when there are others who are open source and sustainable.
Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka
#125So presumably 2.6.20, released yesterday, is the last free version: https://akka.io/blog/news/2022/09/06/akka-2.6.20-released
Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The users I know personally work on internal services in large companies. They didn't necessarily choose it, some did but some just inherited a codebase and have to deal with it. I work in a large company though, so I have no idea if this is average or just my personal bubble :)
Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. Can you please explain exactly what's wrong with that? I mean, the whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant? > Liberal open source licenses are the perfect wea…
> about competitors providing a better service
The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. They have economics of scale on their side, brand recognition, marketing budget, the whole AWS ecosystem that locks developers in. Even if you offered a better and cheaper service (which is not really realistic) then most customers would stick to AWS because they are hosting everything else on it and it is easier that working with multiple providers.
Are you not aware how monopolists work?
Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Hey, at least you could try, right? Try fixing bugs in any ordinary proprietary, non-FLOSS software - or even worse for that matter, a SaSS ("Service as Software Substitute") offering. It's pretty much impossible, by definition.
Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. Can you please explain exactly what's wrong with that? I mean, the whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant? > Liberal open source licenses are the perfect wea…
> The whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant?
Not being relevant isn't the same as not being important.
The aims of FLOSS are good thing, and they are successfully achieved when every computer in the world runs 100% FLOSS code.
But if all code is FLOSS, then the cloud giants can sleep unchallenged, because they have the best machines to run the same code as everybody else. This is an entirely unintended side-effect.
If you consider it an undesirable side-effect as well (and I do), the BSL and similar licenses are a reasonable next step. They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses, while leaving room for upstarts to build a small moat to challenge the cloud giants' gigantic ones.
Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. 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 o…
Like, have you even looked at those prices? $2K per CPU isn't extremely minimal for anybody. If you have a hundred servers with 16 CPUs that's $3M. For just a library. Speaking of a bunch of leeches.
If you've built your entire company around a single library that does all the heavy lifting and you need a hundred servers with 16 CPUs to run just that, why do you think you're entitled to not pay your fair share for it ? Clearly, you chose Akka because it was valuable enough to allow you to bring your company to that scale.
If half of your company is based around gluing together a bunch of things that can only run because of Akka, it is fair that you pay half of your revenue to the people who actually make your company work.