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 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.