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We Are Changing the License for Akka

lightbend.com

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Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#331

Post by Floegipoky »

FromTheSteppe wrote: post #329
Floegipoky wrote: post #269

Man, this is so disappointing. Sure, there are probably businesses out there whose entire livelihood is built on akka, and I get that the creators might be upset that they're not contributing to the project. But there are a lot of other businesses out there where this might be a great solution for a very small part of the problem space, and they are just never going to use this tech now. A few years ago I used akka a…

The biggest and most battle tested implementation is certainly Erlang OTP and not Akka. I'm actually happy more attention will be given to ol' boring Erlang now.

I guess I shouldn't have said that without checking, I'm not sure who's on top. My point still stands though. Most dev shops are already operating on the JVM, trying out akka was a much easier sell than adopting BEAM. Whether or not akka is more widely deployed than erlang, IMO akka was driving more adoption of the actor model.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#332

Post by zxspectrum1982 »

cardanome wrote: post #57
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…

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…

At my previous company, we evaluated Akka to solve some queuing problems in one of our products. Akka would have become one more embedded component of a much larger product, selling >30M USD/year.

At the current price tag (USD $1995/core), Akka would have been prohibitively expensive. Akka pricing does not make sense for OEMs.

Luckily, other features were always more prioritary than moving to Akka, otherwise we'd be in trouble.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#333

Post by dudul »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #88
nine_k wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obvi…

I believe a section of the FAQ mentions that the previous versions (released under Apache) will no longer receive any updates and you're not allowed to integrate the changes to the newer versions into the older codebase.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#334

Post by leaflets2 »

tsss wrote: post #264
zozbot234 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who will maintain it though? It's true that Lightbend is doing almost all of the development. There is no one else who knows the code base and no one willing to learn it, since Akka is pretty uncool nowadays.

Also, Akka is rare technology -- there aren't many well functioning actors and transactional memory implementations in the world. The number of people who can continue maintaining this, is small, and such people are mostly making lots of money doing other things already, I'd think.

GP zozbot234, I'm guessing an OSS fork will go mostly unmaintained or start to source code rot, even if "maintained".

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#335

Post by Aaronontheweb »

bmitc wrote: post #15

Does Akka.NET have any licensing dependencies on Akka? I wonder if this will push people there (please go to F#) or Elixir and Erlang.

Maintainer of Akka.NET here - we're not really affected by this change.

1. We're still porting features that are all licensed under Apache 2.0, as other comments have mentioned. 2. None of Akka.NET's source code has been authored by Lightbend and we certainly don't fall under their Contributor License Agreement (CLA.)

The copyright headers of the Akka.NET files includes a Lightbend attribution currently, but we've included that in there largely out of an abundance of caution - and it's actually a little erroneous for us to do that since many of the files in our projects don't exist in the original Akka source.

Our source was contributed to the .NET Foundation years ago - so I'll ask their OSS counsel if there's anything we need to do differently going forward to keep our source germane under Apache 2.0.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#339

Post by homarp »

homarp wrote: post #236
wmf wrote: post #228

Translation: "I'll never pay for software and maybe Akka should never have been created in the first place."

You forgot to translate first part: "Hey we are _giving_ this software as open-source. Build with us, build on us. Help us beat commercial libraries."

see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32786158
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