If you've built your entire company around a single library that does all the heavy lifting and you need a hundred servers with 16 CPUs to run just that, why do you think you're entitled to not pay your fair share for it ? Clearly, you chose Akka because it was valuable enough to allow you to bring your company to that scale.

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.

> Clearly, you chose Akka because it was valuable enough to allow you to bring your company to that scale.

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.

It's a library. I don't need hundreds of servers to run the library. I need hundreds of servers to run the applications that have it as a dependency.

Imagine if something like gRPC was priced like that.

Yeah, or spring (vmware), or guava (google), or react (facebook), or dozens of other common dependencies.

Thankfully I have managed to avoid Akka in our products but the precedent being set here is worrisome.

It’s usurious to charge $3 million for the privilege of making $25 million?

What is a not-leech price for critical infrastructure that allows you to generate $25 million? $1?