11 ms·

The big takeaway here for me is that Akka has changed license to BSL. It's almost crazy to me that such a fundamental and widely used project would switch to s

The big takeaway here for me is that Akka has changed license to BSL. It's almost crazy to me that such a fundamental and widely used project would switch to such a restrictive license. Some more details here: https://coralogix.com/blog/akka-license-change/ https://coralogix.com/blog/akka-license-change/ > Lightbend are operating on a “per core” model, with their base license starting at $1995 per core (defined as a thread or vCPU) > The license is only enforced if your company earns over $25 million in annual revenue I guess Lightbend is really struggling, but this is probably the end of Akka outside of niche markets / large enterprises. edit: HN discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32746807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32746807

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
2.6.19 will be forked and a community-driven Akka will emerge eventually.
- jsiepkes 4y ago
  Has a champion risen to the task yet? Forking a project is no easy feat. Certainly not one the size of Akka. You need a corporate backer who is going to put at least one person full time on it. I've seen plenty of forks start out with the best of intentions only to slowly fade in to nothing.
  - halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
    It's only been a week since the announcement, I'd expect it'll take a while.
  - Test0129 4y ago
    https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/08/open_source_biz_sick_of/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/08/open_source_biz_sick_... Here's an article on it. Their logic actually makes sense. Not that I support gouging customers, but when you consider how there are massive billion dollar companies with expensive lawyers figuring out how to end-around OSS (via SaaS, etc) this is the logical conclusion. A lot of companies make a lot of money on OSS and give little to nothing in return. This isn't in the spirit of OSS but company men don't really care. So it seems like Akka finally got sick of it and is now coming to collect its (without question) overdue paycheck from these people. It's just unfortunate they went so aggressive with it. $2000/vCPU/year will do a lot of damage to smaller projects in the process of sinking the billion dollar open source leeches in the process.
    - azemetre 4y ago
      If you’re making $25mil in revenue why is it out of the question to pay for licenses?
      - Test0129 4y ago
        Why would you? License requisition is a real pain, they have to be factored into the budget, depreciated, etc. If you can instead simply pull in OSS and hide it behind a SaaS implementation (thereby complying with licenses) you can leverage it to make money. I don't think Stallman saw this coming. Some companies do better than others. For example, FAANG level companies typically have teams that do give back. In some cases several orders of magnitude more than they take from popular projects. It's the in-betweens, the other companies that don't do anything other than leech.
        svnpenn 4y ago
        > pull in OSS and hide it behind a SaaS implementation (thereby complying with licenses) sorry, but you can do that shit anymore: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_License#Network_deployment_is_distribution https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_License#Network_dep...
        bhuber 4y ago
        My interpretation of that clause is it applies to distributing code over a network. The most common example of this is serving javascript to a web browser. I'm pretty sure putting an API in front of a server that happens to run open source software doesn't count as "distribution", which is what we're talking about here with SAAS providers and Akka. If it does, then every site that is backed by servers running linux and not distributing their GPL license to clients is also in violation.
        svnpenn 4y ago
        I would disagree with your assessment. OSL was specifically crafted, to close this exact loophole: > Most other open source licenses treat such network uses of software as internal to the company that runs the server, and they don't require disclosure of source code. That is seen by many nowadays as a loophole that permits large online companies to avoid their reciprocal source code obligations. http://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm#_Toc187293088 http://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm#_Toc187293088
- afpx 4y ago
  Given that thousands of projects are dependent on it, I would hope so. https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.typesafe.akka/akka-actor/usages https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.typesafe.akka/akka-ac...
return_to_monke 4y ago
They kind of went down the communist route, but backwards? From public property to "tax the rich"
Test0129 4y ago
Could you add a link (or explanation in parentheses) that BSL means Business Source License and not Boost Software License? I was confused for a few about why people would be up in arms about the boost license which seems to me like an MIT variant.
CodeSgt 4y ago
Am I the only one that doesn't think this is really all that bad? I'll admit that I've not ever written a line of Scala, but in principal it seems like the only people who have to follow this license will be those who can afford it. Sure, true FOSS is always better, bit the maintainers have to eat somehow. If you're making 25m+ ARR and are using their software, maybe you should be paying them something.
- mbfg 4y ago
  i am rewritting all of our projects (about 20 or so) to get off akka as we speak. Pain in the arse, but has to be done. It's a shame. Was fun while it lasted.
- treis 4y ago
  The problem is that there's nothing stopping them from removing that 25m limit and jacking up the price tomorrow. It's putting your company at the mercy of another company which is not an ideal position. It's also sort of a meta problem. You generally want to use well known libraries/frameworks so that you can hire people with experience. If other companies stop using it because of the above you probably want to stop as well even if you are not worried about hte license.
- mdasen 4y ago
  I think it presents a problem beyond paying. At my job, I can't just reach for Akka. I need to talk to someone who has the authority to purchase a $2,000/year/core license. If I'm deploying something to 6 instances with 4 cores each, that's $48,000/year for a pretty small deployable. It might be totally worth the price, but I'm definitely going to need to justify to someone that we're going to spend a fifth the price of an engineer because I want to use Akka for this small thing. People will propose alternatives. Before, if Akka was an average addition to the project, it was fine. Most things are average. Now, it's an average addition when we should have used something else and it's costing is $48,000/year. What happens when we want to scale it up to 24 instances for a week to handle unexpected load? Do we pay $192,000? I'm not trying to sound difficult. I just know the types of questions that will come up in meetings. Likewise, how are we going to account for our Akka usage? Do engineers put it in a spreadsheet that they all forget exist? Won't they just forget when they add a new deployable or when they scale something up? How do we alert accounting or whomever that they need to pay additional license fees when we deploy something new or scale up? I don't need the same meetings around FOSS. I don't need to involve accounting with FOSS. I don't need to figure out how we're going to sort out the billing. Yes, all these instances will have charges from AWS or whatever, but those are already handled. Yes, companies sometimes buy licenses from JetBrains for their IDEs, but you don't have to worry about those license fees once the code is written - it's a production cost, not a running cost. Yes, after several years Akka goes back to open source (so it isn't a liability forever), but if you keep updating it (including security updates) then it keeps being that liability you need to pay for. Then there's the issue of ecosystem and vitality. The $2,000/core price is going to shrink the ecosystem down to a tiny fraction of what it used to be. I can hear the comments in the meeting now: why would we be paying $2,000/year/core to buy into a dying ecosystem? I think the per-core license scheme makes sense to the maintainers - the more you use it, the more value and revenue you're generating with it, the more you should pay us. However, this creates two problems: 1) it makes it hard to deploy low-margin services using Akka so you can only use it in high-margin situations; 2) it means that you really don't know what it's going to cost if you scale up - how many cores are you going to be using a year or two from now? Microsoft licenses Visual Studio to companies earning over $1M/year, but they're licensing it on a per-engineer basis rather than per-core. Telling a company, "that engineer you're paying $100,000-500,000/year is going to cost you an additional $500-1,000/year," is a very understandable cost and seems like a small/marginal cost per engineer. Telling a company, "that engineer that chose to use Akka is going to cost you an additional $2,000-3,000,000/year," isn't the same thing at all. 100 instances with 16 cores each is $3.2M. You can argue that the company is using Akka so much so they should be paying that much, but at the same time it means that maybe the company would have been better hiring a different engineer that would have used anything other than Akka. If the company had gone with Go or C#, they wouldn't be spending that $3.2M. The company would be better off if they hired a different engineer who wrote the system in Go rather than someone who decided they liked Scala and Akka. Yes, I'd say it is that bad. The ecosystem will shrivel as people turn away from Akka, it will be difficult to get it approved as you'll need to go through meetings and come up with ways of accounting and paying for it, and the pricing scheme makes it very difficult to offer lower margin services and presents the company with potentially nebulous costs depending on how successful it is. It's not just about paying. There's so much crap that can happen when you build your stuff around something proprietary. I'm not saying Lightbend will be like Oracle, but companies literally spend lots of money building proofs-of-concept using other databases to get negotiating leverage with Oracle - "see, we ported part of our thing to Postgres so unless you give us a good deal, we'll just replace you." At what point would my company start doing that with Lightbend and wasting my time as an engineer on nonsense? Does Lightbend end up having a "we caught a whale" mentality if my thing takes off or would they say, "oh, we're happy you're successful and we'll cap your license fees at $25,000/year - you clearly shouldn't have to spend millions a year paying us"? Lots of people have talked on here about building your product on someone else's platform. Usually that's about building on Facebook or Twitter who might cut off your access. Often enough, we talk about proprietary databases and lock-in worries. Building on a proprietary library like Akka isn't that different. You're going to be beholden to Lightbend. I do think that we are too averse to paying for things, but I also genuinely fear the land-and-expand strategy that so many companies have. Maybe it's just $10,000/year today, but that could easily skyrocket under certain circumstances - and it's not always easy to migrate off something once you're on it.
runamok 4y ago
Imo this kind of license is a huge PITA with containerized workloads that autoscale, etc. Would one pay based on average core usage or peak usage?
- p_l 4y ago
  As much as people like to rant about license managers used in proprietary software (and hardware from IBM...), that's a necessary feature for handling that kind of license well.
xani_ 4y ago
Well, unless some big player forks it and puts the developers on keeping the development of the fork.
- mbfg 4y ago
  far less likely being scala
hayd 4y ago
Surely it's the death of Akka inside large enterprises (outside of very niche, already written, applications). How can they justify the enormous departmental cost? If a small team in a large company is creating a new product why on earth would they choose to use Akka? If you're a small company, likely to never hit $25m ARR, this won't affect you... Or is a ticking time bomb should you ever cross that threshold.

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago

2.6.19 will be forked and a community-driven Akka will emerge eventually.

jsiepkes 4y ago
Has a champion risen to the task yet? Forking a project is no easy feat. Certainly not one the size of Akka. You need a corporate backer who is going to put at least one person full time on it. I've seen plenty of forks start out with the best of intentions only to slowly fade in to nothing.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  It's only been a week since the announcement, I'd expect it'll take a while.
- Test0129 4y ago
  https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/08/open_source_biz_sick_of/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/08/open_source_biz_sick_... Here's an article on it. Their logic actually makes sense. Not that I support gouging customers, but when you consider how there are massive billion dollar companies with expensive lawyers figuring out how to end-around OSS (via SaaS, etc) this is the logical conclusion. A lot of companies make a lot of money on OSS and give little to nothing in return. This isn't in the spirit of OSS but company men don't really care. So it seems like Akka finally got sick of it and is now coming to collect its (without question) overdue paycheck from these people. It's just unfortunate they went so aggressive with it. $2000/vCPU/year will do a lot of damage to smaller projects in the process of sinking the billion dollar open source leeches in the process.
  - azemetre 4y ago
    If you’re making $25mil in revenue why is it out of the question to pay for licenses?
    - Test0129 4y ago
      Why would you? License requisition is a real pain, they have to be factored into the budget, depreciated, etc. If you can instead simply pull in OSS and hide it behind a SaaS implementation (thereby complying with licenses) you can leverage it to make money. I don't think Stallman saw this coming. Some companies do better than others. For example, FAANG level companies typically have teams that do give back. In some cases several orders of magnitude more than they take from popular projects. It's the in-betweens, the other companies that don't do anything other than leech.
      - svnpenn 4y ago
        > pull in OSS and hide it behind a SaaS implementation (thereby complying with licenses) sorry, but you can do that shit anymore: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_License#Network_deployment_is_distribution https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_License#Network_dep...
        bhuber 4y ago
        My interpretation of that clause is it applies to distributing code over a network. The most common example of this is serving javascript to a web browser. I'm pretty sure putting an API in front of a server that happens to run open source software doesn't count as "distribution", which is what we're talking about here with SAAS providers and Akka. If it does, then every site that is backed by servers running linux and not distributing their GPL license to clients is also in violation.
        svnpenn 4y ago
        I would disagree with your assessment. OSL was specifically crafted, to close this exact loophole: > Most other open source licenses treat such network uses of software as internal to the company that runs the server, and they don't require disclosure of source code. That is seen by many nowadays as a loophole that permits large online companies to avoid their reciprocal source code obligations. http://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm#_Toc187293088 http://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm#_Toc187293088
afpx 4y ago
Given that thousands of projects are dependent on it, I would hope so. https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.typesafe.akka/akka-actor/usages https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.typesafe.akka/akka-ac...

return_to_monke 4y ago

They kind of went down the communist route, but backwards? From public property to "tax the rich"

Test0129 4y ago

Could you add a link (or explanation in parentheses) that BSL means Business Source License and not Boost Software License? I was confused for a few about why people would be up in arms about the boost license which seems to me like an MIT variant.

CodeSgt 4y ago

Am I the only one that doesn't think this is really all that bad? I'll admit that I've not ever written a line of Scala, but in principal it seems like the only people who have to follow this license will be those who can afford it. Sure, true FOSS is always better, bit the maintainers have to eat somehow. If you're making 25m+ ARR and are using their software, maybe you should be paying them something.

mbfg 4y ago
i am rewritting all of our projects (about 20 or so) to get off akka as we speak. Pain in the arse, but has to be done. It's a shame. Was fun while it lasted.
treis 4y ago
The problem is that there's nothing stopping them from removing that 25m limit and jacking up the price tomorrow. It's putting your company at the mercy of another company which is not an ideal position. It's also sort of a meta problem. You generally want to use well known libraries/frameworks so that you can hire people with experience. If other companies stop using it because of the above you probably want to stop as well even if you are not worried about hte license.
mdasen 4y ago
I think it presents a problem beyond paying. At my job, I can't just reach for Akka. I need to talk to someone who has the authority to purchase a $2,000/year/core license. If I'm deploying something to 6 instances with 4 cores each, that's $48,000/year for a pretty small deployable. It might be totally worth the price, but I'm definitely going to need to justify to someone that we're going to spend a fifth the price of an engineer because I want to use Akka for this small thing. People will propose alternatives. Before, if Akka was an average addition to the project, it was fine. Most things are average. Now, it's an average addition when we should have used something else and it's costing is $48,000/year. What happens when we want to scale it up to 24 instances for a week to handle unexpected load? Do we pay $192,000? I'm not trying to sound difficult. I just know the types of questions that will come up in meetings. Likewise, how are we going to account for our Akka usage? Do engineers put it in a spreadsheet that they all forget exist? Won't they just forget when they add a new deployable or when they scale something up? How do we alert accounting or whomever that they need to pay additional license fees when we deploy something new or scale up? I don't need the same meetings around FOSS. I don't need to involve accounting with FOSS. I don't need to figure out how we're going to sort out the billing. Yes, all these instances will have charges from AWS or whatever, but those are already handled. Yes, companies sometimes buy licenses from JetBrains for their IDEs, but you don't have to worry about those license fees once the code is written - it's a production cost, not a running cost. Yes, after several years Akka goes back to open source (so it isn't a liability forever), but if you keep updating it (including security updates) then it keeps being that liability you need to pay for. Then there's the issue of ecosystem and vitality. The $2,000/core price is going to shrink the ecosystem down to a tiny fraction of what it used to be. I can hear the comments in the meeting now: why would we be paying $2,000/year/core to buy into a dying ecosystem? I think the per-core license scheme makes sense to the maintainers - the more you use it, the more value and revenue you're generating with it, the more you should pay us. However, this creates two problems: 1) it makes it hard to deploy low-margin services using Akka so you can only use it in high-margin situations; 2) it means that you really don't know what it's going to cost if you scale up - how many cores are you going to be using a year or two from now? Microsoft licenses Visual Studio to companies earning over $1M/year, but they're licensing it on a per-engineer basis rather than per-core. Telling a company, "that engineer you're paying $100,000-500,000/year is going to cost you an additional $500-1,000/year," is a very understandable cost and seems like a small/marginal cost per engineer. Telling a company, "that engineer that chose to use Akka is going to cost you an additional $2,000-3,000,000/year," isn't the same thing at all. 100 instances with 16 cores each is $3.2M. You can argue that the company is using Akka so much so they should be paying that much, but at the same time it means that maybe the company would have been better hiring a different engineer that would have used anything other than Akka. If the company had gone with Go or C#, they wouldn't be spending that $3.2M. The company would be better off if they hired a different engineer who wrote the system in Go rather than someone who decided they liked Scala and Akka. Yes, I'd say it is that bad. The ecosystem will shrivel as people turn away from Akka, it will be difficult to get it approved as you'll need to go through meetings and come up with ways of accounting and paying for it, and the pricing scheme makes it very difficult to offer lower margin services and presents the company with potentially nebulous costs depending on how successful it is. It's not just about paying. There's so much crap that can happen when you build your stuff around something proprietary. I'm not saying Lightbend will be like Oracle, but companies literally spend lots of money building proofs-of-concept using other databases to get negotiating leverage with Oracle - "see, we ported part of our thing to Postgres so unless you give us a good deal, we'll just replace you." At what point would my company start doing that with Lightbend and wasting my time as an engineer on nonsense? Does Lightbend end up having a "we caught a whale" mentality if my thing takes off or would they say, "oh, we're happy you're successful and we'll cap your license fees at $25,000/year - you clearly shouldn't have to spend millions a year paying us"? Lots of people have talked on here about building your product on someone else's platform. Usually that's about building on Facebook or Twitter who might cut off your access. Often enough, we talk about proprietary databases and lock-in worries. Building on a proprietary library like Akka isn't that different. You're going to be beholden to Lightbend. I do think that we are too averse to paying for things, but I also genuinely fear the land-and-expand strategy that so many companies have. Maybe it's just $10,000/year today, but that could easily skyrocket under certain circumstances - and it's not always easy to migrate off something once you're on it.

runamok 4y ago

Imo this kind of license is a huge PITA with containerized workloads that autoscale, etc. Would one pay based on average core usage or peak usage?

p_l 4y ago
As much as people like to rant about license managers used in proprietary software (and hardware from IBM...), that's a necessary feature for handling that kind of license well.

xani_ 4y ago

Well, unless some big player forks it and puts the developers on keeping the development of the fork.

mbfg 4y ago
far less likely being scala

hayd 4y ago

Surely it's the death of Akka inside large enterprises (outside of very niche, already written, applications). How can they justify the enormous departmental cost? If a small team in a large company is creating a new product why on earth would they choose to use Akka? If you're a small company, likely to never hit $25m ARR, this won't affect you... Or is a ticking time bomb should you ever cross that threshold.