We Are Changing the License for Akka • Hacker News Board

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#151

Post by hocuspocus » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 10:15 AM UTC

morsch wrote: post #149

hocuspocus wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not directly no. The last major contribution from Lightbend employees was the big collections rewrite in the standard library (shared by Scala 2.13 and 3.x). The Scala 3 compiler and core tooling is developed by the LAMP, the Scala Center, VirtusLab and a few other people. Lightbend is maintaining Scala 2 compilers (2.11, 2.12, 2.13).

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#152

Post by hugofirth » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 10:17 AM UTC

As a data point, this change will mean a lot of work for us (we built cluster discovery on top of Akka Cluster at Neo4j). I'm not thrilled, but I respect their right to make these changes, and personally think that BSL with a timed revert to Apache 2.0 is a meaningful compromise.

Enterprises have to be sustainable. If you're furious with Lightbend for making this change to protect their bottom line, then you can always fork one of the last open source versions and maintain/fix that yourself. But most people won't do that, because if they did they'd likely have been active contributors to the project before now, reducing the ongoing maintenance burden on Lightbend and potentially avoiding them feeling the need to close-source in the first place.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#153

Post by mk89 » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 10:44 AM UTC

Who is ever going to use Akka after the "3 years"? It says a lot about the company. An despite the fact I love the technology and its community, I wouldn't recommend it anymore, at all. The pricing is simply not right.

I mean, it came so suddenly that you literally have no choice than to pay for at least 1 year, before you port your services to something else (if you can, at all), unless you want CVEs going wild in your production systems.

I wonder what's their long-term vision? Getting rid of Akka as the main business model (subscriptions / support) and focus on something that is maybe based on Akka (I guess Kalix and similar cloud-only services)?

Well, if that's the case, it's a brilliant idea: squeeze as much money now as you can, pivot your company to something different. (SAAS, yay, another one)

Unethical? Maybe yes, a tiny bit.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#154

Post by disruptiveink » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

bb1298 wrote: post #70

kryptiskt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$2k per vCPU is 16k for a pretty standard 8 core ec2. The ec2 itself might cost ~$300 a month or $3600 a year. Where the hell did they come up with this pricing model lol.

This comment is really buried in the discussion. $2000 per vCPU for a library is absolutely insane pricing, unless you're running Akka on a single bare metal server, this is a non-starter for anyone.

Really unsure what Lightbend is trying to do here, this seems like the death of Akka.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#155

Post by runamok » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 10:57 AM UTC

hocuspocus wrote: post #38

keewee7 wrote: post #17

Isn't Akka an important component in various Scala projects like Apache Spark? What are they supposed to do?

Akka is an ecosystem on its own. There's no Akka in Spark, Flink, Kafka, nor at the other end of the Scala spectrum, in FP libraries in the Typelevel or Zio ecosystems. Akka is a part of Play though, which has been abandoned by Lightbend.

So iiuc code using the play framework is permitted to use akka (because it's built on top of it) without paying?

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#156

Post by gortiz » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 11:44 AM UTC

hrpnk wrote: post #111

Is it clear which exact OSS components will get the license change? For example, is akka-http [0] part of these changes? [0] https://github.com/akka/akka-http

Yes. It is very clear. They have changed the license in the repository: https://github.com/akka/akka-http/commit/3e82a2811e853ece3b4...

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#157

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 12:38 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#158

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 12:44 PM UTC

josephcsible wrote: post #3

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.

[deleted]

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#159

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#160

Post by josephcsible » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

mpol wrote: post #8

josephcsible wrote: post #3

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.

> It is like Ghostscript has always done.

No it isn't. Releases of Ghostscript are entirely FOSS from day 1. There's a huge difference between a FOSS project that sells exceptions, and a proprietary program that businesses have to buy a license for to use it all.