311–320 of 360 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those who would have been less upset by it becoming no longer maintained can simply fork and proceed as if that were the case.
No, because the existence of the proprietary competitor to the fork will make it harder to gain traction.
The commercial license is $2k per vCPU LMAO, aka an 8 core node would cost $16k annually to operate. This is about to be an absolute shit storm, don’t see how this will make a lick of financial sense for corporations to pay this.
It’s free for companies with less than 25m annual revenue, just so you know.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear you, but this was always the deal. If anyone ever said, "and we can use this for free forever and it will be updated for us for free forever" they were wrong. Akka devs are 100% within their rights to set the terms of use for their product and thus their work. There was no bait and switch here. This is just how licensing works.
I agree. It's still a very disruptive change for enterprise Akka users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. No, they're just going to not bump Akka until they can either find a replacement, or accept a new version with a new license. You do not need to bump it every month, you can live with half a year o…
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.
What is a not-leech price for critical infrastructure that allows you to generate $25 million? $1?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 maintai…
Akka may have been steered by a group of people incentivised financially to support it, through support agreements or whatever, but it currently has 774 contributors. And frankly, never would have become what it is if it started closed source. Probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground honestly, as something open source would have eaten its lunch. I don't use it, but the idea that I can use something anywhere in perpetuity is part of why I choose to use and give back to FOSS. Many feel the same.
Sure. Anybody can fork the software and maintain it. I love that OpenSearch did exactly that when Elastic decided it wanted money for something built on the efforts of a community. But I also know that forks are another waste of energy. Maintaining two branches that do similar things is silly if I can let you do your job while I do mine. I'm not maintaining my own OS, or my own database, or my own terminal, etc etc. Add to that, how many individuals would be willing to fork when one branch has demonstrated a willingness to make choices in favor of money? It makes me wonder if they'll also push for patents or law suits against those who might add features to Akka Prime or some cleverly named fork.
Frankly, I don't use Akka and I'm definitely not going to now, so as far as I'm concerned, Akka is more than welcome to sign their own death warrant. But this trend of building software with community contributions and then trying to profit from it is worrisome and frankly, pretty close to theft. I don't see any of these companies retroactively paying their contributors, so it's definitely not about "what's right." It's a cash grab branded as sustainability, and it has a chilling effect for me, that pushes against the ideals of OSS.
I don't care to debate open source or license changes, I care mostly about the developers this affects. I care about the people who I got excited about using the actor model with Akka now having to put in a serious amount of effort to rip it out. Mostly these people are at places I no longer work and just inherited codebases where akka happened to win the particular decision on the project. In most of those projects, it could just as easily have been Spring, or Dropwizard, or Kafka Streams, or dozens of other libraries and frameworks.
For those of you who work for companies that don't have over $25m in revenue, please never choose Akka. A company looking to acquire your company is going to do their due diligence looking for poison pills, and Akka became one of those today. For those of you who work for companies making over $25m in revenue, you probably know that the way scaling works, your company is very likely to have a loss rather than a profit. You're also likely to have lots of people in accounting, and requisition, and many levels of management, and not a single one of them will ever consider $2k per vCPU for even a second.
Most companies that have that much revenue are building on pretty rough margins that have gotten a lot rougher this year, and the expectation from the market is to start showing a profit right away. Many companies are finding smaller margins at the same time, and working with a scale of many tens of thousands of vCPUs running in cloud environments, earning only a small amount above the opEx (or maybe even below) of the cloud bill.
These companies are also likely to have to follow regulations like SOC2 or SOX, and have requirements for patching CVEs, so it isn't an option to just keep the same version of Akka once a CVE has been discovered. This is particularly true if you're using akka-http as those servers might be handling traffic that isn't even going through a WAF. Developers in this situation are going to be absolutely screwed. There's no way the company will justify a license that costs more than the physical hardware something is running on, but there is no way they can just not upgrade, either. Maybe the company decides that it'll license, and only have to lay off 50 people as a result. Maybe the company decides it'll fork and 5 people have to maintain that fork until the company can migrate to something else. I know if I were one of those people, I'd quit. I think the best scenario here is to just drop everything you were doing, and either rewrite your akka components or try to swap in something like ZIO and hope you can complete the project before a big CVE hits.
And if a >8 CVE does hit Akka soon, maybe that would be a good thing, as it might foster the creation of one particular fork that could actually gain traction, rather than a diffuse set of hundreds of forks that never gain critical mass.
I contributed a bit to Akka over the years, both in terms of commits (nothing huge but a few here and there) and in terms of community building. I introduced a number of developers to the Actor Model and did several presentations on how cool Akka Streams was, to several hundred people. I'm not "akka royalty" but I _was_ an Akka proponent. I definitely consider this a big middle finger and am pretty sad about what I a…
A lot of “open source means I get to use the software for free and tell the authors what to do, forever, while not contributing a thing in return” in this thread.
That's bullshit and you should know it. The owners got a shitload in return with developers investing time and money into learning their product and suggesting it be used, fueling any side-businesses that the Akka folks had. This was never open source in the true spirit of open source and yet they touted this strong brand. The same thing has happened several times, especially in the database space. Use the "fake open…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 maintai…
Interesting that you went to profit immediately. Much of my use of OSS is personal and for fun and because I believe it makes the world a better place that I can run things like Linux and postgres and get so much out of my computer that would never be possible if I had to pay for all of this. Furthermore, I don't like doing things many different ways, because it's a waste of time and energy, so I try to bring my expe…
Akka’s new license only charges entities that are making $25 million dollars per year. I do not think this impacts hobbyist’s ability to play around with it, so yes, profit is a very obvious point to bring up. The only limitation is literally on organizations that are massively profiting off of it.
It’s also “interesting” that you didn’t address my questions aside from:
>I also know that forks are another waste of energy.
That is not knowledge that I share. I was under the impression that lots of good software has been built by forking other good software but maybe I’m wrong!
>Frankly, I don't use Akka and I'm definitely not going to now, so as far as I'm concerned, Akka is more than welcome to sign their own death warrant.
Why on earth are you so enthusiastic about this software then? Are you shelving your plans to build a $25 million per year business on top of this software? Is that what normally happens when you play around with OSS for fun?
As for their death warrants, I hope they sign some big fat checks instead of doing free work to impress random people that have a convenient quasi-religious morality of “money for me but not for thee”