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

141–150 of 360 posts

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#141

Post by abrookewood »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #71
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 not the change, it's the way the sell it. If they have just been up front about it ("Look, OSS isn't working for us so we are going to take it closed source.") then there would be much less drama. Instead they always try to weasel-word how they believe they are still open source when they are not in a lame attempt to not scare away their contributors.

Completely agree. The wording and justification is just terrible.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#142

Post by hocuspocus »

rockyj wrote: post #117

It all started with Scala which was a decent, functional Java (at the time) and then they formed a commercial organisation called "TypeSafe" around it. Then it took on VC money and then also renamed itself to "Lightbend" (for some reason). In this time, Akka which was one of the special library of Scala was also included in the Lightbend fold with many of the prominent devs. While I understand that open source develo…

The trajectory of Lightbend has been raising doubts for a while, some would argue since the renaming.

One important change coming with Scala 3 is precisely that its future doesn't depend on Lightbend's financial success anymore.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#143

Post by arinlen »

cardanome wrote: post #127
arinlen wrote: post #113

Earlier 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. 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 an…

> The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company.

It looks to me that AWS only has around 30% of the cloud market, and CloudFlare is outcompeting AWS in some market segments oddly enough due to things like CloudFlare Worker's, which are developed from the V8 engine which is as FLOSS as it gets.

It looks like behind the thin veil of a badly formed "unfair competition" argument, there's only an irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#144

Post by nilsm_ »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #82
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).

It can add up quickly if you use a couple of libraries and also have to license the OS and perhaps other software. Some proprietary software companies can be quite aggressive with what they consider as cores, e.g. if you have a large VMWare Cluster they consider every single CPU of that cluster for license costs, not just the ones the software runs on - because you could potentially scale the system up or down or do a live migration.

I'm not sure how that would even work with cloud providers, at the worst you would have to pay for the max number of cores you have used in a year (however, it's not even clear what a core is in that context with SMT and preemptable cores).

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#145

Post by scary-size »

rockyj wrote: post #117

It all started with Scala which was a decent, functional Java (at the time) and then they formed a commercial organisation called "TypeSafe" around it. Then it took on VC money and then also renamed itself to "Lightbend" (for some reason). In this time, Akka which was one of the special library of Scala was also included in the Lightbend fold with many of the prominent devs. While I understand that open source develo…

Totally agree. Akka was a huge selling point for Scala. It's a huge loss for the ecosystem. Akka isn't "just" a library, it's a programming model. A lot of software is built around that model and it's going to be a painful effort to get rid of it. It made itself irreplaceable and now they're pulling the plug.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#146

Post by KingOfCoders »

nilsm_ wrote: post #144
KingOfCoders wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It can add up quickly if you use a couple of libraries and also have to license the OS and perhaps other software. Some proprietary software companies can be quite aggressive with what they consider as cores, e.g. if you have a large VMWare Cluster they consider every single CPU of that cluster for license costs, not just the ones the software runs on - because you could potentially scale the system up or down or do…

Yes I had dealings with two in particular which are very agressive.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#147

Post by zozbot234 »

scary-size wrote: post #145
rockyj wrote: post #117

It all started with Scala which was a decent, functional Java (at the time) and then they formed a commercial organisation called "TypeSafe" around it. Then it took on VC money and then also renamed itself to "Lightbend" (for some reason). In this time, Akka which was one of the special library of Scala was also included in the Lightbend fold with many of the prominent devs. While I understand that open source develo…

Totally agree. Akka was a huge selling point for Scala. It's a huge loss for the ecosystem. Akka isn't "just" a library, it's a programming model. A lot of software is built around that model and it's going to be a painful effort to get rid of it. It made itself irreplaceable and now they're pulling the plug.

There will just be a fork under a different name, starting from the last freely-licensed version. Right to fork is integral to FLOSS, specifically to protect against the whole "suppliers take the ball and go home" scenario.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#148

Post by erik_seaberg »

threeseed wrote: post #41
capableweb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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?

If you need to know the price then I doubt you are Akka's target customer.

It’s a waste of time for me to evaluate something whose cost definitely won’t be approved. $25M revenue doesn’t mean a company is actually profitable yet.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#149

Post by morsch »

hocuspocus wrote: post #142
rockyj wrote: post #117

It all started with Scala which was a decent, functional Java (at the time) and then they formed a commercial organisation called "TypeSafe" around it. Then it took on VC money and then also renamed itself to "Lightbend" (for some reason). In this time, Akka which was one of the special library of Scala was also included in the Lightbend fold with many of the prominent devs. While I understand that open source develo…

The trajectory of Lightbend has been raising doubts for a while, some would argue since the renaming. One important change coming with Scala 3 is precisely that its future doesn't depend on Lightbend's financial success anymore.

How so? Aren't they the most significant contributor by far?

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#150

Post by perceptronas »

morsch wrote: post #121
perceptronas wrote: post #104

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?

Depends on what we are replacing.

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.

Post reply on HN