I have no problem with companies using whatever license, I do have trouble with them getting traction being open and then turning around as soon as they can squeeze a little money out of the people who were fooled.
I don't use Akka, but I feel the pain of the people who did that and now has to tear the thing out. 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.
They will be free to continue using the version of Akka they currently use. If there was ever any assumption of future free versions, without remuneration, that was misguided. Akka could have been abandoned at any moment.
If management blamed me for the company blissfully reaping the benefits of open source, I would be glad to work elsewhere. The customers of Akka have gotten exactly as much as they have paid for.
Did you feel their elation at being able to use Akka for free? They can, as long as they stay on the Apache versions.
> Bait and switch is never nice
I don't see any bait and switch here. If you can find Akka devs saying "we'll let you use this for free forever and we'll keep updating it for free forever" then I'll eat it, but until then, this is just how software licensing works.
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.
Even without the CLA, it was permissively licensed. Having your code rolled into a proprietary product is always a possibility you're consenting to when you contribute code under such a license.
Really unsure what Lightbend is trying to do here, this seems like the death of Akka.
A tiny single bear metal server, at that; most server hardware I use has 48 cores!
There is like nothing where that would be cheap. Even if you looked for something that has very high IPC and clock rate.... the CPU with that will have at least 4 cores if not more.
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 of not patching it while you make your decision.
Additionally, your company is making 25 million in revenue, they can afford the extremely minimal cost. Not accepting that cost shows the company for what it is, a bunch of leeches.
Speaking of a bunch of leeches.
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.
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.
Imagine if something like gRPC was priced like that.
Thankfully I have managed to avoid Akka in our products but the precedent being set here is worrisome.
What is a not-leech price for critical infrastructure that allows you to generate $25 million? $1?
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.
That is the strategy companies are using to monetize these sort of projects. Give it away for free and then charge when a company has to make the choice of spending money to get rid of it and to replace it or to just pay for it. The lesson to take away is that any open source supported by a company will potentially become something that will have to be licensed commercially, so if anything will create an incentive to not use open source.
Bad news. And people here are asking where's the bait and switch? Amazing.
"Pinning your version" forever isn't a viable strategy in lots of cases.
I just wish we all collectively made FOSS work, because to my mind it's the greatest development in computing history, instead of going the proprietary road once again. Which I think is bad for all of us, even if short term it might look like a solution.
But yes, leeching is a problem.
I would be very careful to use "open source" technology from companies that depend on sales from this piece of technology. Did this particular piece help get the company to $100M+? Yes, and people too often forget where technology got them to, when blaming said technology. Could something other have work too? (Yes, see Redis)
I feel your comment is a gross misrepresentation of the problems posed by replacing a FLOSS license like Apache with a proprietary one.
Software that was released yesterday under a license like Apache will remain FLOSS today, and usable under the exact same terms. Subsequent releases won't, but the one version you've been using to sell your product/service will remain usable under the old terms.
To me chosing an open source framework to base my future on the framework needs a healthy community of committers.
And that's perfectly fine. FLOSS assures you have access to the source code so that you can dig in and fix any issue you feel strongly about.
What FLOSS does not grant you is a right to demand maintenance and unpaid work from third parties.
If your view on FLOSS is so militant about the right to maintenance,you should also be mindful of the fact that it's you and people like you who are expected to do said maintenance.
No it isn't, and I've never said so. I've created several open source projects which got quite successful without taking money or the intention of taking money and gave maintainance as I saw fit.
"so that you can dig in and fix any issue you feel strongly about."
Trying to fix critical bugs twice, because their was no support, without being able to fix them, I think this often is delusional. Even finding people to pay willing to fix such bugs is a challenge (but we did pay several $10k to people for fixing bugs). But as I've said, YMMV and you might have been able to fix critical bugs in something like the storage backend of MySQL, I probably can't without breaking things.
There is a difference between fixing a missed edge case in a date formatting library or a race condition in a MySQL backend.
Now, I don't know if I can contribute (which includes usage, because the more I use it, the better I understand it and the more confidently I can recommend it and help others to use it) to software that's trying to do the OSS paid support model, because that company might decide at any point that they're not "getting enough value" and relicense to terms that don't work for me, thus causing me to need to either live with the software as is, no bugfixes or new features, or rework it out of my architecture.
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.
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.
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”
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.
Use a copyleft-licensed project with outside contributors if you want the project to stay free.
Rather look at how many organizations are paying for contributions. If it's all resting on a single back there's increased danger.
Still, the only way to guarantee continued development is paying for it (or doing it yourself).
If you have all the information about the pricing model up front you can make good decisions about using the software or not. If the pricing model changes your decisions can get invalidates and might require serious effort to remove the dependency on that piece of software.
It's bait and switch, and nobody likes that. They used a true open source license, earning them developer good will, until it stopped serving their purposes. It also undermines open source as a concept.
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 license… and don’t think they could or should pay a licensing fee when they (inevitably?) hit that revenue target?