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.

but is it more than $2k per core disruptive? if so, why not just pay up, and not have the disruption?

Sure? Which option is better totally depends on your use case. If it's a microservice running on 500 cores ($1M/year licensing), and a rewrite would cost 1 person-year (say $300k), then the rewrite is clearly worth it. But if you're running on 10 cores, and a rewrite would take 10 person-years... then it makes more sense to pay.

This is where I’m confused. Are the average current users of Akka making more than $25 million in revenue? Or is the average Akka user on track to hit $25 million before they can figure out costs or other options?

The users I know personally work on internal services in large companies. They didn't necessarily choose it, some did but some just inherited a codebase and have to deal with it. I work in a large company though, so I have no idea if this is average or just my personal bubble :)