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

341–350 of 360 posts

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#341

Post by bmitc »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #335
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 in…

That’s great! Hopefully this means some JVM developers will move over to .NET.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#342

Post by yawaramin »

piaste wrote: post #166
josephcsible wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if it is , then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs. The AGPL already solves this. Whatever secret sauce the giants add to do that, you can just take it and add it back to your original program.

Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price". The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform. One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.

> One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL

That's exactly what the AGPL does. You just claimed it doesn't prevent cloud providers from running the software at low cost on their own datacentres.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#343

Post by yawaramin »

piaste wrote: post #129
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…

> 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…

> They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses

What benefits? By not being FLOSS they just removed most of the rights and freedoms that users would have with the software.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#344

Post by [deleted] »

yawaramin wrote: post #343
piaste wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses What benefits? By not being FLOSS they just removed most of the rights and freedoms that users would have with the software.

[deleted]

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#345

Post by piaste »

yawaramin wrote: post #343
piaste wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses What benefits? By not being FLOSS they just removed most of the rights and freedoms that users would have with the software.

I don't think this level of absolutism is justified. I think that it's a stretch to define cloud providers as "users" in the first place:

What is Akka? A distributed messaging platform.

If you want to use Akka to move messages, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you. (Even if you're Amazon! No discrimination against trillion-dollar companies!)

If you want to use Akka and Akka's code to learn how messaging work, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you.

If you want to use Akka's code as a starting point to author your custom messaging platform, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you.

When is it not like the AGPL to you? Only when you don't want to actually use Akka yourself, but you want to charge others a fee to let them use Akka on your server.

In that case, and only in that case, SSPL says "you are not a user of this program and are not entitled to the Four Freedoms". I find myself in agreement with that assessment.

EDIT: I originally mentioned the BSL in this thread, that was a mistake. The BSL (free except for users >$25M) is a non-free license that I consider legitimate and understandable and better than almost any other non-free license, but less than ideal. The SSPL (free except for cloud providers) is the non-free license that I find most acceptable, to the point where I think AGPL projects will make the world a better place by switching to the SSPL.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#346

Post by piaste »

yawaramin wrote: post #342
piaste wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price". The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform. One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.

> One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL That's exactly what the AGPL does. You just claimed it doesn't prevent cloud providers from running the software at low cost on their own datacentres.

The AGPL only covers modification to the software itself. So Amazon can take free code, sell it as a slickly-packaged service, and not need to share anything.

The SSPL says that if they do so, they need to share the code they use to make it run as a service.

They still retain their massive hardware and organizational advantages, but it does mean that at least every user has access to the code to make their "Akka Service" as good as Amazon's.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#347

Post by ramchip »

chii wrote: post #314
ramchip wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It's still a very disruptive change for enterprise Akka users.

but is it more than $2k per core disruptive? if so, why not just pay up, and not have the disruption?

Sure? Which option is better totally depends on your use case. If it's a microservice running on 500 cores ($1M/year licensing), and a rewrite would cost 1 person-year (say $300k), then the rewrite is clearly worth it. But if you're running on 10 cores, and a rewrite would take 10 person-years... then it makes more sense to pay.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#348

Post by yawaramin »

piaste wrote: post #346
yawaramin wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL That's exactly what the AGPL does. You just claimed it doesn't prevent cloud providers from running the software at low cost on their own datacentres.

The AGPL only covers modification to the software itself. So Amazon can take free code, sell it as a slickly-packaged service, and not need to share anything. The SSPL says that if they do so, they need to share the code they use to make it run as a service. They still retain their massive hardware and organizational advantages, but it does mean that at least every user has access to the code to make their "Akka Serv…

> So Amazon can take free code, sell it as a slickly-packaged service, and not need to share anything.

Right, because they didn't change it. So what would there be to share anyway? 'Go to https://github.com/akka/akka'?

> but it does mean that at least every user has access to the code to make their "Akka Service" as good as Amazon's.

That code is meaningless. In this scenario we already established that Amazon is selling an unmodified copy of Akka as a Service (which, by the way, we will revisit this point later). And we already established, in your own words, that it's not about the code:

> Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price".

So what would the SSPL require, they publish their deployment scripts to their cloud datacentres? Like I said, that's meaningless.

> "Akka Service"

Final point. There's no such thing as an 'Akka Service'. Akka is a bunch of libraries. You link it into your JVM application. You don't run Akka separately, so by definition you can't offer it as a service (even if you're Amazon).

Hence my suggestion of AGPL, and heck let's be generous, let's add a commercial use exception for businesses with less than $20m revenue, similar to what they're doing now with the BSL. Except with my suggestion the software would stay as strong copyleft, most businesses would be happy with the commercial use exception, and a few would have to pay their fair share.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32751373

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#349

Post by yawaramin »

piaste wrote: post #345
yawaramin wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses What benefits? By not being FLOSS they just removed most of the rights and freedoms that users would have with the software.

I don't think this level of absolutism is justified. I think that it's a stretch to define cloud providers as "users" in the first place: What is Akka? A distributed messaging platform. If you want to use Akka to move messages, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you. (Even if you're Amazon! No discrimination against trillion-dollar companies!) If you want to use Akka and Akka's code to learn how messaging work, t…

As established in my earlier comment, your original premise and your entire argument is incorrect. Akka is not a 'messaging platform'. It's a bunch of libraries that you link in to your JVM app. No one (well, no sane person) would try to 'charge others a fee to let them use Akka' on their server because technologically that doesn't make sense. It's akin to charging people a fee for a service to concatenate strings together. Hence as you can see, the SSPL is not an appropriate fit for Akka anyway.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#350

Post by the_af »

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…

> they formed a commercial organisation called "TypeSafe" around it. Then it took on VC money and then also renamed itself to "Lightbend"

My alarm bells were ringing as far back as that name change. Everyone I knew who used Scala thought the name change was silly and foreboding of bad things. "TypeSafe" has a nice, technical ring to it, and it embodied what we thought Scala was all about.

Now, "Lightbend". Talk about a fluffy, meaningless, VC-friendly name. It sounded ominously wrong back then. I guess we skeptics were proven right after all these years...

Post reply on HN