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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

#181

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

haspok wrote: post #178

Can someone explain how this sudden change of license is even possible (legally)? I mean, what if I contributed to the project back when it was Apache licensed, in good faith that my changes would be freely available (as in free beer)? Now they decide that they ask money for something that includes my contribution? Don't they have to ask for the contributors permissions to be able to do that? (Just a hypothetical exa…

I'm not a lawyer and I haven't read the Apache license lately, but I think it's a permissive enough license that they probably can sub/relicense it as long as they keep everybody's copyright notices intact. That is, effectively just leave all the code under the Apache license but also add additional terms and conditions because it doesn't prohibit that. This is in sharp contrast to, say, GPL, which would have prevented such a maneuver. (Or, as a sibling, notes, if they required a CLA then they legitimately have the ability to relicense everything at will.)

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#183

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

disruptiveink wrote: post #154
bb1298 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

> unless you're running Akka on a single bare metal server

A tiny single bear metal server, at that; most server hardware I use has 48 cores!

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#184

Post by miragecraft »

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…

Is it really bait and switch if the company has a contributor/committer license agreement in place?

Having that license made it clear the company want to reserve the right to change the license, including going to closed source if they decide to.

Plus, you made it sounds like an open source project has a moral obligation to the companies that uses it for free. That seems backwards.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#185

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #130
kryptiskt wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like, have you even looked at those prices? $2K per CPU isn't extremely minimal for anybody. If you have a hundred servers with 16 CPUs that's $3M. For just a library. Speaking of a bunch of leeches.

If you've built your entire company around a single library that does all the heavy lifting and you need a hundred servers with 16 CPUs to run just that, why do you think you're entitled to not pay your fair share for it ? Clearly, you chose Akka because it was valuable enough to allow you to bring your company to that scale. If half of your company is based around gluing together a bunch of things that can only run…

> Clearly, you chose Akka because it was valuable enough to allow you to bring your company to that scale.

If that selection was made when it was being given away for free, it's rather hard to make the determination.

> If half of your company is based around gluing together a bunch of things that can only run because of Akka, it is fair that you pay half of your revenue to the people who actually make your company work.

And half to Linux, and half to GNU, and half to Apple, and half to your compiler of choice? There are a lot of critical pieces of infrastructure; I'm not really sure that this line of reasoning holds up very well. Unless of course, you think this one library is so magical that it deserves more money than all the other critical components.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#187

Post by haspok »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #181
haspok wrote: post #178

Can someone explain how this sudden change of license is even possible (legally)? I mean, what if I contributed to the project back when it was Apache licensed, in good faith that my changes would be freely available (as in free beer)? Now they decide that they ask money for something that includes my contribution? Don't they have to ask for the contributors permissions to be able to do that? (Just a hypothetical exa…

I'm not a lawyer and I haven't read the Apache license lately, but I think it's a permissive enough license that they probably can sub/relicense it as long as they keep everybody's copyright notices intact. That is, effectively just leave all the code under the Apache license but also add additional terms and conditions because it doesn't prohibit that. This is in sharp contrast to, say, GPL, which would have prevent…

Yeah, in the meantime I did find the word "sublicense" in section "2. Grant of Copyright License" of the original text. Fair enough.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#188

Post by jvican »

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…

> 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.

IMO Scala still is a great functional alternative to Java. But this narrative you're laying out here is misrepresenting the reality. It's true Akka was a good way to get Scala adoption, but that stopped being the case a long time ago. Today, despite being still a bit niche, Scala has many other big Scala projects and frameworks that hold its weight.

And, by the way, the Scala 2 -> 3 migration is being wonderfully executed, as it's been designed. No other high level language at this point promises the same set of binary compatibility (even across 2.13 and Scala 3) as Scala does, e.g. it's much better than Java, Python, Rust, etc.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#189

Post by ahtihn »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #130
kryptiskt wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like, have you even looked at those prices? $2K per CPU isn't extremely minimal for anybody. If you have a hundred servers with 16 CPUs that's $3M. For just a library. Speaking of a bunch of leeches.

If you've built your entire company around a single library that does all the heavy lifting and you need a hundred servers with 16 CPUs to run just that, why do you think you're entitled to not pay your fair share for it ? Clearly, you chose Akka because it was valuable enough to allow you to bring your company to that scale. If half of your company is based around gluing together a bunch of things that can only run…

It's a library. I don't need hundreds of servers to run the library. I need hundreds of servers to run the applications that have it as a dependency.

Imagine if something like gRPC was priced like that.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#190

Post by msbarnett »

capableweb wrote: post #124
hobofan wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since it's clearly possible to have sustainable projects licensed under Apache Just because it's possible for _some_ projects to live sustainable and be licensed under Apache, doesn't mean that it's possible for all projects to be developed sustainably under that license.

> doesn't mean that it's possible for all projects to be developed sustainably under that license Absolutely, I agree with that, it doesn't give you the right to be sustainable, merely the chance . What I find weird is claiming that Akka is unsustainable because it's open source, when there are others who are open source and sustainable.

> What I find weird is claiming that Akka is unsustainable because it's open source

Akka is Open Source. Akka's authors feel that continuing the status quo is unsustainable.

Whether or not it's unsustainable because it's open source to some extent doesn't really matter – perhaps with enough elbow grease on their part they could drum up more community maintainers and make it both sustainable and continuously open source, but that would require putting in yet more uncompensated work on the hope that it might lower their burdens at some point down the road, and come with the issue that more volunteers mean more work trying to coordinate everyone.

Or they could just make it source available for the first 3 years and ask for money from the companies using it commercially – there's also no guarantee that this will work, but money will solve more problems in the short term, so I can understand why they made the choice they did.

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