We Are Changing the License for Akka

Re:We Are Changing the License for Akka by KingOfCoders on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @03:41AM (#32747702)

I was once working for a company who had stellar growth to $100M+ revenue and millions of users, started with a "open source" framework for distributed caching, needed to buy the enterprise version for support, the vendor got bought up by a large evil enterprise and the licensing costs got 10x without pre-warning, and it was a very complicated task to get that core technology pulled (mostly because it was too complicated, but also because it was to expensive) out over years, replaced by Redis.

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)

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Re:We Are Changing the License for Akka by arinlen on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @03:51AM (#32747777)

> I would be very careful to use "open source" technology from companies that depend on sales from this piece of technology.

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.

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Re:We Are Changing the License for Akka by KingOfCoders on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @04:00AM (#32747854)

I've used many open source projects in the past, several of them had critical bugs, that did not get fixed (e.g. either the core developer abandoned it, or the BDFL said WONTFIX). A software without someone fixing the problems is - YMMV - too risky to use. And fixing a bug on your own in something complex and complicated like Akka without breaking things is no easy task (essentially creating and maintaining your own fork).

To me chosing an open source framework to base my future on the framework needs a healthy community of committers.

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Re:We Are Changing the License for Akka by arinlen on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @04:10AM (#32747914)

> I've used many open source projects in the past, several of them had critical bugs, that did not get fixed (...)

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.

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Re:We Are Changing the License for Akka by KingOfCoders on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @04:14AM (#32747944)

"If your view on FLOSS is so militant about the right to 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.

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Re:We Are Changing the License for Akka by zozbot234 on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @04:30AM (#32748056)

Hey, at least you could try, right? Try fixing bugs in any ordinary proprietary, non-FLOSS software - or even worse for that matter, a SaSS ("Service as Software Substitute") offering. It's pretty much impossible, by definition.

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Re:We Are Changing the License for Akka by kat_rebelo on Thursday September 08, 2022 @01:38PM (#32768904)

Infinispan and Red Hat being bought by IBM?

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