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Insurance has a number of niche software products where this has happened. The license fee goes up by 1000%, with zero investment in the product. It takes compa

Insurance has a number of niche software products where this has happened. The license fee goes up by 1000%, with zero investment in the product. It takes companies a decade to get off, and the new owners enjoy the proceeds in the meantime.

yashap 4y ago
In the open source world, Akka, the most popular actor system library in the JVM ecosystem, that’s heavily used in tonnes of open source projects, recently went from “free and open source” to “paid/proprietary and source available.” https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561 https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561 Same strategy - the pricing is insanely high (for a library), and the project is effectively dead now, but it’ll take some larger enterprises awhile to move away from. I find it especially sleazy due to the nature of transitive dependencies in open source. For example, somebody creates a popular open source lib out of their own sense of good will, let’s call it “Foo lib.” It depends on Akka, all is fine for years, then all of the sudden Typelevel (Akka maintainers) say “physche, Akka is proprietary now, Foo lib users now owe us $$$.” Gross.
- woah 4y ago
  Couldn't they just not upgrade the Akka dep?
  - yashap 4y ago
    Yes, but not for long. Typelevel will patch the last open source version (2.6) with critical security updates for the next year (until Sept 2023), but not afterwards.
    - woah 4y ago
      Then they should maintain it themselves, or pay the maintainers what they are asking for
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Opensource licenses don't allow that... The most an evil maintainer can do is make new versions of a library be expensive. For things like GPL code an evil maintainer can add in code that checks a license key and only runs if said key is present. Or add a dependency on a closed source component. You still have a right to use the old version forever for free. And that's what any business in this position should do - just make a 'maintenance only' fork.
- jdougan 4y ago
  Has anyone started a fork from the last Apache licensed version?
- kjeetgill 4y ago
  Oh jeez. I'm no lawyer, but well copyleft sure sounds nice right now. I'd imagine if it was GPL it couldn't be relicensed incompatibly because the new version is still derived from the old one, right?

yashap 4y ago

In the open source world, Akka, the most popular actor system library in the JVM ecosystem, that’s heavily used in tonnes of open source projects, recently went from “free and open source” to “paid/proprietary and source available.” https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561 https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561 Same strategy - the pricing is insanely high (for a library), and the project is effectively dead now, but it’ll take some larger enterprises awhile to move away from. I find it especially sleazy due to the nature of transitive dependencies in open source. For example, somebody creates a popular open source lib out of their own sense of good will, let’s call it “Foo lib.” It depends on Akka, all is fine for years, then all of the sudden Typelevel (Akka maintainers) say “physche, Akka is proprietary now, Foo lib users now owe us $$$.” Gross.

woah 4y ago
Couldn't they just not upgrade the Akka dep?
- yashap 4y ago
  Yes, but not for long. Typelevel will patch the last open source version (2.6) with critical security updates for the next year (until Sept 2023), but not afterwards.
  - woah 4y ago
    Then they should maintain it themselves, or pay the maintainers what they are asking for
londons_explore 4y ago
Opensource licenses don't allow that... The most an evil maintainer can do is make new versions of a library be expensive. For things like GPL code an evil maintainer can add in code that checks a license key and only runs if said key is present. Or add a dependency on a closed source component. You still have a right to use the old version forever for free. And that's what any business in this position should do - just make a 'maintenance only' fork.
jdougan 4y ago
Has anyone started a fork from the last Apache licensed version?
kjeetgill 4y ago
Oh jeez. I'm no lawyer, but well copyleft sure sounds nice right now. I'd imagine if it was GPL it couldn't be relicensed incompatibly because the new version is still derived from the old one, right?