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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

#291

Post by galaxyLogic »

cheriot wrote: post #266

I only worked with the Akka ecosystem a little, but if I had made a major career or business investment in it I'd be pretty unhappy about this. There's nothing wrong with closed source software and I want the authors to make money. It's changing the terms on users that pulls the rug out from under people.

It is not changing the terms for the users of the current version of AKKA. You will be free to use your current version with whatever terms you already have.

You can fork the current version, that's the whole idea of Open Source. But you cannot take away the rights of the AKKA team to create their commercial "fork" either. That much was clear from the beginning I assume. License does what it says it does, it doesn't give you free access to all future forks.

AKKA coming out with a commercial license does not make things worse for you, you can keep on using what you have under the license terms attached to it.

Imagine if AKKA STOPPED making any software. Would that be morally wrong? They are not doing that but they will be providing more software with a different license. Take it or leave it, or fork the existing version with the same license. Ah the beauty of Open Source.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#292

Post by res0nat0r »

tsss wrote: post #262
ccleve wrote: post #193

To everyone who thinks that $2k/vCPU is a lot of money, it's not. First, if you're running it on an 8-core server, that's $16k per year, which is about what many companies are paying for an enterprise support contract. It's not much when you consider that it gives you access to Akka engineers at the cost of 1/10 of an FTE. Second, the $2k number is a list price. All large enterprise deals are negotiated, and nearly a…

An 8-core server? Please. Just my team uses 70 vCores (peak) in our Kubernetes cluster. Without a custom licensing agreement that's $140k/year. The whole company is bound to pay well over $500k/year. Furthermore, most people here (as usual) seem to be completely ignorant about what Akka is. The vast majority of Akka users only ever interact with Akka through other libraries that depend on it: Akka-HTTP, Akka-Streams,…

Since they aren't charging any companies that make less than $25 million a year this sounds reasonable.

Most folks here don't seem to grasp the cost of most enterprise software, Oracle has been charging 10x this for decades now.

https://www.oracle.com/assets/technology-price-list-070617.p...

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#293

Post by usrusr »

res0nat0r wrote: post #273
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "moral high ground" is a recognition of the true dynamic in open source. What really happens is: 1) Project is open source 2) People use the project because it is open source 3) People contribute bug reports and fixes, creating value and improving the open source project because it is open source 4) People spread the word about the project, free marketing because it is open source 5) Maintainers decide to relicen…

I think it's simpler than that, just from their relicensing FAQ: https://www.lightbend.com/akka/license-faq > Akka requires significant investment in order to maintain its position as a preeminent distributed systems runtime. Many organizations have adopted Akka and are seeing significant benefits for their organizations. > However, in recent years an increasing number of those organizations have elected to self-supp…

The real question is wether they will actually generate more revenue with the change or perhaps less. There's always some fork on the old licence and it wouldn't be the first time that the fork eventually surpasses the original. Even amongst those who paid for support before the change, some might not be willing to commit to a future of not having a choice.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#294

Post by braingenious »

bachmeier wrote: post #268
beebmam wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the problem with wanting to be paid for your labor?

So you mean everyone that contributed when the project was FOSS should be paid for their labor when this ceases to be FOSS?

I really don’t understand how licensing works, but doesn’t the Apache 2.0 license essentially mean “anybody can do anything they want with this code”?

If that is the case, wouldn’t that right also apply to the primary maintainer/owner of the copyright or is it just the users that have that privilege?

If I were concerned about somebody eventually monetizing a product that I contributed to, I wouldn’t contribute to anything.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#295

Post by galaxyLogic »

res0nat0r wrote: post #273
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "moral high ground" is a recognition of the true dynamic in open source. What really happens is: 1) Project is open source 2) People use the project because it is open source 3) People contribute bug reports and fixes, creating value and improving the open source project because it is open source 4) People spread the word about the project, free marketing because it is open source 5) Maintainers decide to relicen…

I think it's simpler than that, just from their relicensing FAQ: https://www.lightbend.com/akka/license-faq > Akka requires significant investment in order to maintain its position as a preeminent distributed systems runtime. Many organizations have adopted Akka and are seeing significant benefits for their organizations. > However, in recent years an increasing number of those organizations have elected to self-supp…

> organizations have elected to self-support

That is the conundrum of Open Source: Great open source software will be so easy to maintain that everybody can do that for themselves. Therefore the economic incentive for Open Source authors is to create software which requires maintenance.

Either way, someone has to pay in the end, either for the license, or for the maintenance. There's no free lunch.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#296

Post by discodachshund »

haspok wrote: post #177
morsch wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the alternatives?

If you want Scala-specific and production grade... hmmm... So there is Loom comig from one side, and effect libraries like cats and zio from the other side... great promises, but would I trust them with production code?... Hmmm... But there is always the option to lean back on Java and Spring and JEE - the old and boring but tried and tested ways on the JVM.

You can absolutely trust them with production code. Disney Streaming (CE and ZIO) and ITV (just CE) run them

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#297

Post by trenchAlmond »

I read this whole discussion. Here's what I think.

What I realized is that there are two groups of people here.

One group considers Open Source a religion. The other thinks of it as business.

The "religion" folks liken Open Source to the work of saints and prophets. The creators of Open Source do it because they love the work and helping people. And it's not cool if they stop being saints one day, much like the actual religious people wouldn't like seeing their icons turn into something else.

The "business" bunch say there's freedom in Open Source to change anything on a dime, including for money. The fact you offered software as an Open Source is a strategy, and no matter how much it helped and how many people and for how long, you absolutely have the right to nail them one morning.

What I would say here is this:

Open Source was a reaction to actions of Giants, like Microsoft, Oracle and others. That's all it was. It was the Software Woodstock, which then turned into goo and spilled everywhere. Now, we're all snickering and crying from joy in the back of our heads whenever we get some cool piece of Open Source software. It's like God granting wishes.

And nowadays, Open Source is a big business with the currency made of influence and worship of followers. And just like real religion, there's a hat on a pew where money somehow shows up every Sunday, at least for those whose gospel greases the wheels of commerce.

That said, it's high time to at least acknowledge this, rather than endlessly wax philosophical about the Soul of Open Source.

And what about the millions who labor in and around Open Source, and don't even get recognition? They count on Divine Accounting to give them their fair share back one day. But they're getting restless.

So in short, Software Woodstock has turned into What The Hell Is This. But it's just Religion and Business, all wrapped together.

And with ominous clouds of resource scarcity, inflation and geopolitics from hell, it will soon turn into Check Please! Time to separate Religion from Business. It's all Business, folks!

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#298

Post by noctune »

capableweb wrote: post #24
keewee7 wrote: post #17

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

Other libraries depending on Akka shouldn't have to change, as they are merely published as "libraries", not deployed to "production". Libraries generally never have "annual revenues more than US $25m", so it should be free for them to use the code as well. Realistically though, they force you to contact them to get a "Additional Use Grant" in case you want to use Akka for other open source projects: > I use Akka for…

Akka's new license is highly likely incompatible with the Apache Software Foundation requirements for third party licenses. "Additional use grant" might mean a OSS project does not have to pay, but it still puts heavy restrictions on forking that project.

So Apache projects depending on Akka, like Flink or Spark, will probably have to fork it or be stuck on the current version.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#299

Post by IshKebab »

scary-size wrote: post #145
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…

Totally agree. Akka was a huge selling point for Scala. It's a huge loss for the ecosystem. Akka isn't "just" a library, it's a programming model. A lot of software is built around that model and it's going to be a painful effort to get rid of it. It made itself irreplaceable and now they're pulling the plug.

It isn't lost though is it? Just slightly delayed. Honestly this seems like the lightest possible "our developers need to eat" solution out there. More relaxed than GPL or AGPL or open core. If you're against this then honestly I think you're an unrealistic radical who can be safely ignored.

Re: We Are Changing the License for Akka

#300

Post by braingenious »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #212
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…

The reason it brings people out of the woodworks is the way that it erodes trust. How many more people will decide that they deserve more money, and relicense their software, leaving me in a bind? I used to know that software licenses were generally stable, and an Apache2.0 project was safe to use, and I could contribute and use the software knowing generally that my contributions would be part of something that cont…

This is where I don’t fully understand what “trust” means here. It kind of sounds like it’s “trusting” that users will be able to profit from the software in perpetuity at the expense of the developer.

Isn’t one of the core ideals of FOSS forking? If you’re certain that no other person could possibly fork a piece of software and provide bug fixes and new features, isn’t that a tacit admission that the primary maintainer is the only person on earth that could do so?

If I were the only person on earth that could write a bit of software, I would not do that for free. It would be downright weird and entitled to expect that from me.

If I wasn’t the only person on earth that could write such code, I would happily watch and encourage the people that prefer to have an Apache 2.0 licensed derivative of the original work.

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