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

161–170 of 360 posts

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#161

Post by josephcsible »

piaste wrote: post #123
arinlen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

> 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.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#162

Post by that_guy_iain »

kryptiskt wrote: post #67
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…

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…

> I don't use Akka, but I feel the pain of the people who did that and now has to tear the thing out.

I highly suspect very few will ahve to tear it out. It'll cost more money to replace than it would to pay license fees for many companies. Developer time costs money.

> Because I don't see how anyone would want to use it, that pricing is completely ridiculous. No one should pay per vCPU, much less those extortionate amounts.

These are companies making lots of money. The license fee isn't that much when it comes to the amount the company is making.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#163

Post by that_guy_iain »

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.

I'm 99% sure they got this pricing model from their current contracts for support contracts with enterprise companies.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#164

Post by josephcsible »

zozbot234 wrote: post #122
bjornsing wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> You are not entitled to ongoing, continued maintenance of any FLOSS project.

If it were just no longer being maintained, nobody would be nearly as upset. But it is still being maintained; it's just no longer FLOSS.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#165

Post by josephcsible »

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…

Because we're unselfish? Society would be a way worse place if nobody ever opposed anything bad unless it harmed them personally.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#166

Post by piaste »

josephcsible wrote: post #161
piaste wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#167

Post by josephcsible »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #63
tus666 wrote: post #2

> Production use of the software requires a commercial license from Lightbend I.e. it's not free anymore. That's what the title should say, instead we get an history lesson.

It's not free any more for companies >$25M in annual revenue .

It's not gratis anymore for companies >$25M in annual revenue. It's not free as in speech anymore for anyone.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#168

Post by SouthShoreShip »

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.

What do you mean no Akka in Flink ? https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/master/flink-rpc/flink-...

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#169

Post by josephcsible »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #34
WatchDog wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's what they cared about, they could have copied what ElasticSearch did, and switched to a Server Side Public License (SSPL).

While the SSPL should be recognized as a copyleft open source license, since the OSI has refused to accept it, it's not really any different than the BSL at this time. If the OSI did their actual job, and promoted open source and helped foster a business-friendly open source license that prevented Amazon from sherlocking everyone, it'd probably see major adoption.

> the SSPL should be recognized as a copyleft open source license

How do you figure? I don't think it should.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#170

Post by PeterZaitsev »

Yet another "We're saving Open Source by Ditching Open Source" announcement. Open Source license does not fit every business model, in fact models around true Open Source were always hard, really hard.

Yet lets be real and call things the way they are - you decided what Open Source is not right business license for your project and choosing to use Proprietary (Source Available) license instead.

Post reply on HN