We Are Changing the License for Akka
lightbend.com
lightbend.com
> Sadly, open source is prone to the infamous “Tragedy of the commons”, [...] This situation is not sustainable and one in which everyone eventually loses.
> So what does sustainable open source look like? I believe it’s where everyone—users and developers—contributes and are in it together, sharing accountability and ownership.
> This means that companies using the software for profit need to give something back, either code, documentation, community work, or money. In sustainable open source, participants feel the need and moral obligation to contribute.
They even go so far to say they believe BSL to be Open Source, which means they fundamentally misunderstand the idea behind Open Source:
> We believe the BSL 1.1 with our open source grants and Apache re-license is a form of productive and sustainable open source.
They also seem to not know of any big Apache projects that are sustainable, even though there are many examples out in the wild. Apparently none of those projects are sustainable, just because Lightbend didn't manage to actually get major contributors to their own project?
> Apache 2.0 is a very liberal license well suited for early, small open source projects establishing community.
> With Akka now considered critical infrastructure for many large organizations, the Apache 2.0 model becomes increasingly risky when a small company solely carries the maintenance effort.
Just because you didn't manage to build a company around a Open Source library/ecosystem, doesn't mean Open Source is not sustainable. It just means that your company is not sustainable. But I guess it's hard to blame yourself when you see others using your code without paying for it.
After 3 years since release the code automatically gets relicensed under Apache 2.0 and becomes open source. This is a nice provision that prevents the code from being completely lost if the company loses interest in it.
To me it reads like they chose to switch to a proprietary license but don't want to be subjected to the natural consequences of betraying the trust of their userbase.
open source creators are systematically abused by large companies who free ride despite being able to financially contribute, and they just don't because they can.
"why give the creator a fair share if you can keep them alive with a few graceful breadcrumbs" seems to be such corporations way of thinking, highly profitable formally but the FOSS creators.
thus an agpl, thus the new Akka license.
I've seen companies claiming "but you can use our buggy unsecure code after 3 years" but reality I'm yet to see actually anyone using this with BSL software.
I disagree with the idea that the only correct definition of open source is the one that favors big tech monopolists.
Times have changed compared to when the open source movement started. Not many people would have imagined that the monopolists would weaponize open source like they do now. They are not the first company to adapt their license to the changing circumstances, see Elastic.
What do you think "weaponize open source" means? It doesn't look like it means a thing, and lounds like a poor attempt at shoehorning "weapon" in a discussion on how a potential user's income is something noteworthy.
Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have. All things being equal, they can always crush the competition with their market position.
Can you please explain exactly what's wrong with that? I mean, the whole point of FLOSS is to ensure everyone has the right to access, fix, and alter the software. Why do you feel anyone's revenue is relevant?
> Liberal open source licenses are the perfect weapon for the monopolists because they ensure an "equal" playing field, meaning they have access to the same tech that smaller companies have.
Your comment makes zero sense. FLOSS is about ensuring the right to use, fix, and alter software. It's not about people with a axe to grind about competitors providing a better service.
The only weapon I see here is people trying to abuse the concept of FLOSS to complain about their inability to profit from other people's software because others do a better job.
The point is you can NOT outcompete Amazon on that as a smaller company. They have economics of scale on their side, brand recognition, marketing budget, the whole AWS ecosystem that locks developers in. Even if you offered a better and cheaper service (which is not really realistic) then most customers would stick to AWS because they are hosting everything else on it and it is easier that working with multiple providers.
Are you not aware how monopolists work?
It looks to me that AWS only has around 30% of the cloud market, and CloudFlare is outcompeting AWS in some market segments oddly enough due to things like CloudFlare Worker's, which are developed from the V8 engine which is as FLOSS as it gets.
It looks like behind the thin veil of a badly formed "unfair competition" argument, there's only an irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party.
> irrational concern that revenue should be tied to rights to access software developed by a third-party
It's the rational concern that major developers of widely-used software should be paid.
Not being relevant isn't the same as not being important.
The aims of FLOSS are good thing, and they are successfully achieved when every computer in the world runs 100% FLOSS code.
But if all code is FLOSS, then the cloud giants can sleep unchallenged, because they have the best machines to run the same code as everybody else. This is an entirely unintended side-effect.
If you consider it an undesirable side-effect as well (and I do), the BSL and similar licenses are a reasonable next step. They preserve the social benefits of open source licenses, while leaving room for upstarts to build a small moat to challenge the cloud giants' gigantic ones.
What benefits? By not being FLOSS they just removed most of the rights and freedoms that users would have with the software.
What is Akka? A distributed messaging platform.
If you want to use Akka to move messages, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you. (Even if you're Amazon! No discrimination against trillion-dollar companies!)
If you want to use Akka and Akka's code to learn how messaging work, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you.
If you want to use Akka's code as a starting point to author your custom messaging platform, then the SSPL is just like the AGPL to you.
When is it not like the AGPL to you? Only when you don't want to actually use Akka yourself, but you want to charge others a fee to let them use Akka on your server.
In that case, and only in that case, SSPL says "you are not a user of this program and are not entitled to the Four Freedoms". I find myself in agreement with that assessment.
EDIT: I originally mentioned the BSL in this thread, that was a mistake. The BSL (free except for users >$25M) is a non-free license that I consider legitimate and understandable and better than almost any other non-free license, but less than ideal. The SSPL (free except for cloud providers) is the non-free license that I find most acceptable, to the point where I think AGPL projects will make the world a better place by switching to the SSPL.
Traditionally, one of the best paths for an upstart company to challenge an established giant was to develop superior technology. Indeed, this is how some of the cloud giants themselves got their start against the dinosaurs of the day.
But in a tech culture where open source is not just common but expected, this path is severely hampered. A lot of tech users won't even consider your fancy new technology if it isn't open source, but if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs.
This is what "Microsoft loves open source" means. When they had the (commercially) superior tech, they disparaged open source as nonsense so they wouldn't be asked to share. Twenty years later, when they realized that there was more and better tech out there than they could hope to produce, they aligned and supported that very ideology so that "we have Redis" or "we have Akka" wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore.
Ultimately, it's a twist on the old "commodify your competition".
The AGPL already solves this. Whatever secret sauce the giants add to do that, you can just take it and add it back to your original program.
The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform.
One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.
That's exactly what the AGPL does. You just claimed it doesn't prevent cloud providers from running the software at low cost on their own datacentres.
The SSPL says that if they do so, they need to share the code they use to make it run as a service.
They still retain their massive hardware and organizational advantages, but it does mean that at least every user has access to the code to make their "Akka Service" as good as Amazon's.
Right, because they didn't change it. So what would there be to share anyway? 'Go to https://github.com/akka/akka'?
> but it does mean that at least every user has access to the code to make their "Akka Service" as good as Amazon's.
That code is meaningless. In this scenario we already established that Amazon is selling an unmodified copy of Akka as a Service (which, by the way, we will revisit this point later). And we already established, in your own words, that it's not about the code:
> Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price".
So what would the SSPL require, they publish their deployment scripts to their cloud datacentres? Like I said, that's meaningless.
> "Akka Service"
Final point. There's no such thing as an 'Akka Service'. Akka is a bunch of libraries. You link it into your JVM application. You don't run Akka separately, so by definition you can't offer it as a service (even if you're Amazon).
Hence my suggestion of AGPL, and heck let's be generous, let's add a commercial use exception for businesses with less than $20m revenue, similar to what they're doing now with the BSL. Except with my suggestion the software would stay as strong copyleft, most businesses would be happy with the commercial use exception, and a few would have to pay their fair share.
Also, when was the last time an “upstart” challenged a giant successfully?
- Microsoft has been a “giant” since 2000
- Apple became the worlds most valuable company in 2011.
- Google has been the go to search engine at least since the early 2000s
- Amazon has been dominant in its field at least since around 2000.
[1] Jassy is my skip^9 manager
[2] https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas...
I think you're thinking of "commodify your complement"? Commodifying your competition would seem to be a bad thing, as prices drop for something that substitutes for what you're selling. Might work in particular luxury/Veblen goods, but seems likely to be less of a thing? (and certainly a different thing than "commodify your complement")
https://www.lightbend.com/blog/low-cpu-utilization-fortune-5...
[1] As found on https://akka.io/
Open Source is established term which offers specific freedoms which brings specific benefits (and challenges) to businesses.
While many Venture funded companies might want you to believe they are being unfairly taken advantage by the clouds it is not the full story.
Elastic for example relies on A LOT of code contributed by community, which were contributing because they could use end result under Open Source License.
Elastic changing the license changed relations here to you contribute to create the product BUT you do not get all the rights to use it any more.
In Elastic case in particular large number of cloud solutions were build which embed their solution (arguably same as Elastic embedds Lucene) who could not use Elastic after license change.
There's basically been a resounding "Meh" about them and the people who work on software that adopts them generally move to an open fork or the project perishes (see also the fate of Solaris, Illumos, and Oracle.)
In the past few years, it seems several notable company-backed projects have switched from the Apache licence, to some proprietary licence. I'd much prefer if instead they tried switching to a strong copyleft licence. (Granted, 'delayed open source' is far better than 'never open source'.)
At the current price tag (USD $1995/core), Akka would have been prohibitively expensive. Akka pricing does not make sense for OEMs.
Luckily, other features were always more prioritary than moving to Akka, otherwise we'd be in trouble.
This almost religious attitude makes no sense to me. Clearly other’s use of that code wasn’t very sustainable, since the author now says they will no longer maintain it for free. You’re essentially describing the “everyone looses” outcome that the OP wants to address, but you seem to think it’s a good outcome.
Plenty of big Apache projects have major contributors from multiple projects/ecosystems/companies, without having to change the license to something not Apache. Since it's clearly possible to have sustainable projects licensed under Apache, I'm saying that it sounds more like an excuse rather than a proper argument for the license change.
Just because it's possible for _some_ projects to live sustainable and be licensed under Apache, doesn't mean that it's possible for all projects to be developed sustainably under that license.
Absolutely, I agree with that, it doesn't give you the right to be sustainable, merely the chance.
What I find weird is claiming that Akka is unsustainable because it's open source, when there are others who are open source and sustainable.
Akka is Open Source. Akka's authors feel that continuing the status quo is unsustainable.
Whether or not it's unsustainable because it's open source to some extent doesn't really matter – perhaps with enough elbow grease on their part they could drum up more community maintainers and make it both sustainable and continuously open source, but that would require putting in yet more uncompensated work on the hope that it might lower their burdens at some point down the road, and come with the issue that more volunteers mean more work trying to coordinate everyone.
Or they could just make it source available for the first 3 years and ask for money from the companies using it commercially – there's also no guarantee that this will work, but money will solve more problems in the short term, so I can understand why they made the choice they did.
You are not entitled to ongoing, continued maintenance of any FLOSS project. If you have such needs, you can get paid support or fork the project and maintain it yourself.
If it were just no longer being maintained, nobody would be nearly as upset. But it is still being maintained; it's just no longer FLOSS.
How many of these would have to opt for this source available approach before Akka would no longer be sustainable?
While I understand that open source developers also need to make money, I do not think this mode of operation is my favorite. When a programming language / library / tool takes on VC money it is just inevitable that they will need a mode of revenue in the near future and this is one way to do it.
Anyways, between this and the Scala 2 -> 3 migration, I do not think I would recommend Scala to anyone now or touch it myself.
One important change coming with Scala 3 is precisely that its future doesn't depend on Lightbend's financial success anymore.
Being around the edges of the tech orgs that went in early on Scala it often felt like the Scala ecosystem initially thrived (the likes of Twitter releasing genuine quality oss in particular) despite the lack-lustre job of Typsesafe / Lightbend to cement themselves at the center.
With play being given to the community, lagom being underwhelming and a bit of a catch-the-wave thing, it's only really Akka that endures on top of the core language, which isn't really a great showing after so long.
Definitely. I remember some of us Scala early adopters being concerned about the nonsensical name change, and being assured by others that nothing fundamental was being changed, that Lightbend was "a more user friendly name than TypeSafe" (as if the notion of type-safety was a barrier to entry for goddamn Scala, for crying out loud).
Seems we skeptics were proven right.
GP zozbot234, I'm guessing an OSS fork will go mostly unmaintained or start to source code rot, even if "maintained".
IMO Scala still is a great functional alternative to Java. But this narrative you're laying out here is misrepresenting the reality. It's true Akka was a good way to get Scala adoption, but that stopped being the case a long time ago. Today, despite being still a bit niche, Scala has many other big Scala projects and frameworks that hold its weight.
And, by the way, the Scala 2 -> 3 migration is being wonderfully executed, as it's been designed. No other high level language at this point promises the same set of binary compatibility (even across 2.13 and Scala 3) as Scala does, e.g. it's much better than Java, Python, Rust, etc.
My alarm bells were ringing as far back as that name change. Everyone I knew who used Scala thought the name change was silly and foreboding of bad things. "TypeSafe" has a nice, technical ring to it, and it embodied what we thought Scala was all about.
Now, "Lightbend". Talk about a fluffy, meaningless, VC-friendly name. It sounded ominously wrong back then. I guess we skeptics were proven right after all these years...
Is everybody here (planning on?) using this software to build companies with more than $25 million in revenue… and they can’t use something else with a more permissible license… and don’t think they could or should pay a licensing fee when they (inevitably?) hit that revenue target?
Akka devs are 100% within their rights to set the terms of use for their product and thus their work. There was no bait and switch here. This is just how licensing works.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
To me chosing an open source framework to base my future on the framework needs a healthy community of committers.
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.
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.
Use a copyleft-licensed project with outside contributors if you want the project to stay free.
Rather look at how many organizations are paying for contributions. If it's all resting on a single back there's increased danger.
Still, the only way to guarantee continued development is paying for it (or doing it yourself).
If you have all the information about the pricing model up front you can make good decisions about using the software or not. If the pricing model changes your decisions can get invalidates and might require serious effort to remove the dependency on that piece of software.
Now, I don't know if I can contribute (which includes usage, because the more I use it, the better I understand it and the more confidently I can recommend it and help others to use it) to software that's trying to do the OSS paid support model, because that company might decide at any point that they're not "getting enough value" and relicense to terms that don't work for me, thus causing me to need to either live with the software as is, no bugfixes or new features, or rework it out of my architecture.
Isn’t one of the core ideals of FOSS forking? If you’re certain that no other person could possibly fork a piece of software and provide bug fixes and new features, isn’t that a tacit admission that the primary maintainer is the only person on earth that could do so?
If I were the only person on earth that could write a bit of software, I would not do that for free. It would be downright weird and entitled to expect that from me.
If I wasn’t the only person on earth that could write such code, I would happily watch and encourage the people that prefer to have an Apache 2.0 licensed derivative of the original work.
Akka may have been steered by a group of people incentivised financially to support it, through support agreements or whatever, but it currently has 774 contributors. And frankly, never would have become what it is if it started closed source. Probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground honestly, as something open source would have eaten its lunch. I don't use it, but the idea that I can use something anywhere in perpetuity is part of why I choose to use and give back to FOSS. Many feel the same.
Sure. Anybody can fork the software and maintain it. I love that OpenSearch did exactly that when Elastic decided it wanted money for something built on the efforts of a community. But I also know that forks are another waste of energy. Maintaining two branches that do similar things is silly if I can let you do your job while I do mine. I'm not maintaining my own OS, or my own database, or my own terminal, etc etc. Add to that, how many individuals would be willing to fork when one branch has demonstrated a willingness to make choices in favor of money? It makes me wonder if they'll also push for patents or law suits against those who might add features to Akka Prime or some cleverly named fork.
Frankly, I don't use Akka and I'm definitely not going to now, so as far as I'm concerned, Akka is more than welcome to sign their own death warrant. But this trend of building software with community contributions and then trying to profit from it is worrisome and frankly, pretty close to theft. I don't see any of these companies retroactively paying their contributors, so it's definitely not about "what's right." It's a cash grab branded as sustainability, and it has a chilling effect for me, that pushes against the ideals of OSS.
Akka’s new license only charges entities that are making $25 million dollars per year. I do not think this impacts hobbyist’s ability to play around with it, so yes, profit is a very obvious point to bring up. The only limitation is literally on organizations that are massively profiting off of it.
It’s also “interesting” that you didn’t address my questions aside from:
>I also know that forks are another waste of energy.
That is not knowledge that I share. I was under the impression that lots of good software has been built by forking other good software but maybe I’m wrong!
>Frankly, I don't use Akka and I'm definitely not going to now, so as far as I'm concerned, Akka is more than welcome to sign their own death warrant.
Why on earth are you so enthusiastic about this software then? Are you shelving your plans to build a $25 million per year business on top of this software? Is that what normally happens when you play around with OSS for fun?
As for their death warrants, I hope they sign some big fat checks instead of doing free work to impress random people that have a convenient quasi-religious morality of “money for me but not for thee”
It's bait and switch, and nobody likes that. They used a true open source license, earning them developer good will, until it stopped serving their purposes. It also undermines open source as a concept.
Enterprises have to be sustainable. If you're furious with Lightbend for making this change to protect their bottom line, then you can always fork one of the last open source versions and maintain/fix that yourself. But most people won't do that, because if they did they'd likely have been active contributors to the project before now, reducing the ongoing maintenance burden on Lightbend and potentially avoiding them feeling the need to close-source in the first place.
I.e. it's not free anymore. That's what the title should say, instead we get an history lesson.
History lessons are always weird in these kind of announcements, but I think this one isn't that bad or deceptive in its approach.
And even then that's mostly because the GPL won't let you. You can combine it with MIT license programs, right?
So much for freedom to distribute, I guess.
> And even then that's mostly because the GPL won't let you. You can combine it with MIT license programs, right?
How about this instead? I can't release a free derivative work of it.
The difference is that they don't restrict freedom, but rather the power to withhold freedom from others: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.en.html
For patents, there's tons. x264 is an easy one.
Not for anyone. In some cases, you might use the source code free of charge. Lowercase "free". But Free for nobody.
First, if you're running it on an 8-core server, that's $16k per year, which is about what many companies are paying for an enterprise support contract. It's not much when you consider that it gives you access to Akka engineers at the cost of 1/10 of an FTE.
Second, the $2k number is a list price. All large enterprise deals are negotiated, and nearly all are discounted from the list price. Akka probably won't discount small deals, but they'll be forced to discount larger ones if the buyer has an alternative. Plus, the buyer will demand SLAs, dedicated support, and will often demand changes to the license and custom work on the software itself (tweaks to make it work with X, etc.)
Akka and their larger customers will make it work. The purpose of this license change is to give Akka the ability to get their customers to the table in the first place.
And hiring a consultant for few months to fix your performance problems is also a hell lot cheaper than paying that much per core, forever.
> Akka and their larger customers will make it work. The purpose of this license change is to give Akka the ability to get their customers to the table in the first place.
Translation: They depend on our software enough that the rewrite is no alternative, they don't have enough onboard talent to fork it, and they have enough money to pay the price.
Which is exactly why this is so unreasonable. The minimum spend for the "standard" license is 40 cores -- which means you're paying at least $80k/yr for a support contract which won't even assign you an account manager or guarantee a response any faster than "4 business days" (yes, really). And as you scale up, it only gets more expensive, and you don't get anything more for your money.
Furthermore, most people here (as usual) seem to be completely ignorant about what Akka is. The vast majority of Akka users only ever interact with Akka through other libraries that depend on it: Akka-HTTP, Akka-Streams, Alpakka Connectors, etc. Hardly anyone actually uses Akka actors directly, the Akka Cluster platform or recently implemented distributed programming features (like Akka persistence) that makes up the business model of Lightbend. It's essentially a runtime system; an implementation detail. It's no surprise that none of these users ever make contributions back to a software that is so far removed from business code.
Most folks here don't seem to grasp the cost of most enterprise software, Oracle has been charging 10x this for decades now.
https://www.oracle.com/assets/technology-price-list-070617.p...
If someone decide to make some useful project opensource. Full respect. If they changed their mind later to make the project proprietary, still full respect. It's like some kind neighbour decides to clean the street for free because it makes the neighbourhood cleaner for everyone. We are not in position to demand the status quo but be grateful of.
There are many projects I would happily pay for. Nginx, zeromq, django, react, elasticsearch, to name a few.
What really happens is:
1) Project is open source
2) People use the project because it is open source
3) People contribute bug reports and fixes, creating value and improving the open source project because it is open source
4) People spread the word about the project, free marketing because it is open source
5) Maintainers decide to relicense, privatizing the value created by the community.
The "success" was a social phenomenon, not merely the efforts of the maintainers.
Relicensing is a betrayal of the community that was built around the software.
When I see open source projects getting relicensed, I automatically assume there is some monetization campaign underway which exploits the community's contributions.
> Akka requires significant investment in order to maintain its position as a preeminent distributed systems runtime. Many organizations have adopted Akka and are seeing significant benefits for their organizations.
> However, in recent years an increasing number of those organizations have elected to self-support without either contributing back to the community or by investing in annual subscriptions. We have an ambitious roadmap for the future of Akka and require a way to fund and sustain that development.
> We believe that larger organizations that are seeing business benefits from Akka should contribute to the ongoing health and evolution of the project.
They need money to continue development, and the current model isn't generating enough revenue for them to stay in business.
That is the conundrum of Open Source: Great open source software will be so easy to maintain that everybody can do that for themselves. Therefore the economic incentive for Open Source authors is to create software which requires maintenance.
Either way, someone has to pay in the end, either for the license, or for the maintenance. There's no free lunch.
But if they had started with a proprietary license, it's likely Akka wouldn't even exist today. So they are now piggybacking on the success brought by using an open source license.
I am grateful that open source projects exist. But their "turning around" doesn't make me less grateful.
If "they" doesn't include all previous contributors, I can see an argument to the contrary.
"FOSS is just not a good business model. But when making decisions about what libraries to use, or where to invest my time, such concerns are simply not my problem."
and:
"It’s morally wrong to make the product popular, by advertising it as Open Source / Free Software, and then doing a reversal later."
If their business model isn't your problem, then what you think about their license isn't their problem.
The problem is not the license but the switch of it after they benefited from being Open Source
Sure, there are probably businesses out there whose entire livelihood is built on akka, and I get that the creators might be upset that they're not contributing to the project. But there are a lot of other businesses out there where this might be a great solution for a very small part of the problem space, and they are just never going to use this tech now. A few years ago I used akka at my current gig for a project that ended up fizzling, and had always hoped to re-introduce it if another appropriate opportunity emerged. This change makes that a non-starter.
I also think this is a big blow in terms of the future of computing. The actor model is so useful, and it's taken so long to come close to mainstream. And now the biggest implementation shoves a giant stick in its own spoke.
We were fortunate to have a strong business model around our healthcare management operations that had nothing to do with the EMR but if I had to do it again speaking from a business standpoint only, I don't think I would do it as open source that way. As recently as 5 years ago open source was viewed with extreme suspicioun if not outright disdain in the largest health institutions, I think that is changing but still has 10-15 years to go.
You can fork the current version, that's the whole idea of Open Source. But you cannot take away the rights of the AKKA team to create their commercial "fork" either. That much was clear from the beginning I assume. License does what it says it does, it doesn't give you free access to all future forks.
AKKA coming out with a commercial license does not make things worse for you, you can keep on using what you have under the license terms attached to it.
Imagine if AKKA STOPPED making any software. Would that be morally wrong? They are not doing that but they will be providing more software with a different license. Take it or leave it, or fork the existing version with the same license. Ah the beauty of Open Source.
> AKKA coming out with a commercial license does not make things worse for you
If I had invested my career in becoming an advocate for their product I'd now be worse off. It can't be introduced without going through legal and procurement. I can't take it home and build a small business without wondering what next year's pricing model will be.
I hope Akka's owners succeed. I also hope none of the tools I invest my time learning and introducing at work do this.
But you might still have a strong career in supporting customers who use the commercial version of AKKA, they are the ones who could pay your salary. And you could fork it, and be the leader of that community. Until perhaps you decided to make a commercial fork as well. :-)
I think it is in a way a good sign when an open-source project creates a commercial fork of itself, it shows there are paying customers for the software, it validates its existence.
And I think it shows these guys believe in their product.
Basically, anything containing Akka at those new versions cannot be used without breaking Akka license.
The problem with what’s happening is that for software in Scala, as soon as I see Akka anywhere in my dependencies, I have to assume license violation. Of course, I can check if that particular dependency has a grant. But will there be a formal method to validate this? Will automated license scanners be able to infer this?
Another point… what does the grant actually imply. Is there some sort of way a product with Akka-dependent dependency supposed to be used? Will people be able to work around BSL by pulling in a dependency that brings Akka in just as a mechanism to sneak Akka itself in? That would be a silly oversight by Lightbend[1]
[1] the faq answers this: “ I am using Play and parts of Akka that are included with Play? If you are using Play and are directly using Akka components as part of your implementation you will be required to have a license for production use.”
As someone who came to Scala from Erlang and adopted Scala because of Akka, … it’s disappointing. Fortunately alternatives exist and hopefully someone will adapt them for Scala. Here’s one: http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/quasar/. This is used by Clojure’s Pulsar Erlang-influenced actors. For me, this is the end of the road for Akka in any future Scala code. It’s a shame because the technology is great. However, maintenance is going to become a hassle.
From an observer’s perspective: Typesafe, later Lightbend, never managed to find a great fit for themselves. They always kept developing Akka and promote Akka-based systems like all the alpakka stuff, http, streams. People used it because it was Apache 2.0. Now, everyone who uses Akka, and wants to continue using it, has a liability on their hands. What about all contributions submitted under the old license? The FAQ doesn’t specify if existing code will be BSL and convert to Apache 2.0 in 3 years (or maybe more, faq says each version may have its own convert date…), or only new code will be BSL. Depending on the answer, some contributors may feel a bit let down: https://github.com/akka/alpakka/graphs/contributors?from=201.... They all contributed under Apache 2.0.
So many questions, it’s a minefield. In my head, this is a minefield worse that AGPL. Their faq says a company with a revenue below USD25m/annum receives a free license. What if said company sells to a USD100m business and is using Akka indirectly? Forget about direct, explicit use. What if a product uses stuff indirectly?
However, it's quite telling that the new blogpost discusses the new pricing but never actually shares the pricing, but only shares the condition for when it's free (as in gratis). Do lightbend themselves think its expensive?
And for them the price is irrelevant if it solves their problem.
Your akka license now costs €32k per year. Meanwhile if you are doing standard five year deprecation your 16 core machine is 4k. This means you are paying 8x the cost of the machine itself for the software license. An important software license but not one that is a full complete piece of work.
I could understand paying this much for software like Wowza where it is a "complete" solution for a problem. Where you are buying a full piece of software, but not a developer framework.
Yet lets be real and call things the way they are - you decided what Open Source is not right business license for your project and choosing to use Proprietary (Source Available) license instead.
https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/typesafe-series-d--...
post-reading: ...probably
Now, Akka came out at the right time and deserved to get popular. It's built on a solid and battle-tested foundation and there is a real community-driven ecosystem around it, or at least there was. It totally made sense. Also Lightbend was on a seemingly good trajectory, and Akka looked like a safe bet.
I guarantee there are small teams out there, at big companies making well over $25m, who are probably overstretched already and now need to plan an unexpected migration. I love Scala but the maintenance burden is real.
i can think of a few companies whose total spend with this license would justify a two pizza team to maintain a fork of akka or replace it outright.
I don’t mind paying for good software, but too many companies abuse their market position once they get big.
For better or for worse, the success of many large open source projects is driven by a community of evangelists that just wouldn't exist if the project weren't open source in the first place.
The longer it runs, the more this is true.
If that is the case, wouldn’t that right also apply to the primary maintainer/owner of the copyright or is it just the users that have that privilege?
If I were concerned about somebody eventually monetizing a product that I contributed to, I wouldn’t contribute to anything.
One issue with the BSL is that old versions of the software are open source. So, with this change, you can still use a 3 year old version of Akka for free. Does akka change rapidly enough these days to justify the price?
What I realized is that there are two groups of people here.
One group considers Open Source a religion. The other thinks of it as business.
The "religion" folks liken Open Source to the work of saints and prophets. The creators of Open Source do it because they love the work and helping people. And it's not cool if they stop being saints one day, much like the actual religious people wouldn't like seeing their icons turn into something else.
The "business" bunch say there's freedom in Open Source to change anything on a dime, including for money. The fact you offered software as an Open Source is a strategy, and no matter how much it helped and how many people and for how long, you absolutely have the right to nail them one morning.
What I would say here is this:
Open Source was a reaction to actions of Giants, like Microsoft, Oracle and others. That's all it was. It was the Software Woodstock, which then turned into goo and spilled everywhere. Now, we're all snickering and crying from joy in the back of our heads whenever we get some cool piece of Open Source software. It's like God granting wishes.
And nowadays, Open Source is a big business with the currency made of influence and worship of followers. And just like real religion, there's a hat on a pew where money somehow shows up every Sunday, at least for those whose gospel greases the wheels of commerce.
That said, it's high time to at least acknowledge this, rather than endlessly wax philosophical about the Soul of Open Source.
And what about the millions who labor in and around Open Source, and don't even get recognition? They count on Divine Accounting to give them their fair share back one day. But they're getting restless.
So in short, Software Woodstock has turned into What The Hell Is This. But it's just Religion and Business, all wrapped together.
And with ominous clouds of resource scarcity, inflation and geopolitics from hell, it will soon turn into Check Please! Time to separate Religion from Business. It's all Business, folks!
"the Apache 2.0 model becomes increasingly risky when a small company solely carries the maintenance effort". Really? Then why are you reverting to that licence after 3 years?
Other projects changing the licence have at least spelled it out honestly: Cloud companies like Amazon are seen as parasitic and the developers of highly successful open source projects want a slice of the pie.
I wonder if this will push people there (please go to F#) or Elixir and Erlang.
This will make it more difficult to catch up however, as the JVM version and code is obviously used as a starting point for bringing functionality over. The main part of it I can think of that was home-grown was the original Akka.Net Split brain resolver, but once light bend open sourced theirs, the project ported that over anyway.
1. We're still porting features that are all licensed under Apache 2.0, as other comments have mentioned. 2. None of Akka.NET's source code has been authored by Lightbend and we certainly don't fall under their Contributor License Agreement (CLA.)
The copyright headers of the Akka.NET files includes a Lightbend attribution currently, but we've included that in there largely out of an abundance of caution - and it's actually a little erroneous for us to do that since many of the files in our projects don't exist in the original Akka source.
Our source was contributed to the .NET Foundation years ago - so I'll ask their OSS counsel if there's anything we need to do differently going forward to keep our source germane under Apache 2.0.
In my humble opinion, Akka is becoming less relevant in Scala community. I don't see new projects picking it up as there are better alternatives.
From what I have encountered: Akka was mostly used as Http server (akka-http). There is Http4s which can replace that and I think is great. Also its easy to use it with tagless final or zio's IO.
Actors computation model depending on use case can be replaced with message brokers or Scala libraries. Like cats-effect or zio for composable concurrency primitives and fs2/zio-streams for stream computations. I know there are actor use cases beyond that, but I am yet to encounter project these days where picking akka would be my first choice.
I have nothing against akka and I definitely enjoyed developing with it 5 years ago.
So there is Loom comig from one side, and effect libraries like cats and zio from the other side... great promises, but would I trust them with production code?... Hmmm...
But there is always the option to lean back on Java and Spring and JEE - the old and boring but tried and tested ways on the JVM.
I mean, what if I contributed to the project back when it was Apache licensed, in good faith that my changes would be freely available (as in free beer)? Now they decide that they ask money for something that includes my contribution? Don't they have to ask for the contributors permissions to be able to do that?
(Just a hypothetical example, I am not an Akka contributor.)
Of course, they can't un-license code that they've already released, but they can re-release the old code under a new license, and ship all new code under that new license going forward.
Yes, it's pretty clear they no longer want to participate in the Open Source ecosystem, as allowing people to run the software however you see fit is a integral part of Open Source, together with being able to modify and reshare said software.
Free money and labor for Amazon ecosystem.
Honestly I'd love to see a license that was "Apache for everyone but Amazon (or other $100B+ companies and their subsidiaries)"
Open source is being weaponized in ways that Stallman never predicted.
"Free software for everyone" is precisely what Open Source is
> Honestly I'd love to see a license that was "Apache for everyone but Amazon (or other $100B+ companies and their subsidiaries)"
Yeah, that's basically what the BSL license Akka is moving to is. Only projects earning over X amount per year need the business license, for others it's free.
AGPL, the license Mongo was originally under, isn't used in reality to prevent deployed applications from hoarding changes; rather, it used to scare commercial entities away from deploying your code. With a commercial CLA providing exclusive code ownership, it allows you a legal club to block others, even other contributors, from competing against your current business interests.
It is licenses like the AGPL and commercial CLAs which have been killing open source and free software, because they destroy motivation for any significant third party contributions and the resulting emergent ecosystem around a project. It reduces the idea of open source and of free software down a lot closer (in my opinion) to source code escrow.
MongoDB didn't want any Amazon changes to be contributed to the project. They wanted to block another commercial entity from offering a service based on their IP. From an open source perspective, I don't take their side any more than I would take Amazon's.
> allowing people to run the software however you see fit is a integral part of Open Source
Does that depend on whether you consider corporations to be people?
SSPL requires you to publish items which may be non-derivative work on certain kinds of performances. Further, it does so specifically to be punitive against certain kinds of use (e.g. use by a competing company).
Because of the requirement to release so much non-derivative work under SSPL, including infrastructure you may not have written yourself or own copyright to, it is likely infeasible for one to be conformant to that provision.
How do you figure? I don't think it should.
I think that makes this change worse, though: it means that the new license will infect many more projects--like Spark, for example. And they won't even be making security patches to existing versions available under the old license. "Nice project you got there, it'd sure be a shame if some unpatched security flaw came along and ruined it," they're saying.
edit: I wasn't aware, but Spark stopped using akka several years ago. But the basic point still stands.
I mean, it came so suddenly that you literally have no choice than to pay for at least 1 year, before you port your services to something else (if you can, at all), unless you want CVEs going wild in your production systems.
I wonder what's their long-term vision? Getting rid of Akka as the main business model (subscriptions / support) and focus on something that is maybe based on Akka (I guess Kalix and similar cloud-only services)?
Well, if that's the case, it's a brilliant idea: squeeze as much money now as you can, pivot your company to something different. (SAAS, yay, another one)
Unethical? Maybe yes, a tiny bit.
Libraries generally never have "annual revenues more than US $25m", so it should be free for them to use the code as well.
Realistically though, they force you to contact them to get a "Additional Use Grant" in case you want to use Akka for other open source projects:
> I use Akka for an OSS project. What does this mean for my project?
> The license offers a customizable “Additional Use Grant” that grants production usage for other OSS projects including Play Framework.
> If you are running an OSS project using Akka, please contact us at akka-license@lightbend.com and we will do our best to continue to support your project.
I wish them luck on their endeavour, but I know what I'd do if I was building a OSS project needing distributed actors, and it's not to send them an email asking if I could please use their software.
So Apache projects depending on Akka, like Flink or Spark, will probably have to fork it or be stuck on the current version.
Akka is a part of Play though, which has been abandoned by Lightbend.
Stories like this one make me nervous about choosing the wrong one. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, there is no putting it back in. You can change the license for future versions, but some big company has the right to fork your code at that point and bury you with their superior resources.
How do you choose a good license without shooting yourself in the foot?
That is not very reassuring advice for a small developer who has limited resources. By opening your source code, you have just given up any head start you might have over the competition. They now have access to every line of code you spent hours agonizing over to get it right. Now they can out market you and leverage their vast resources to steal away any of your potential customers.
- I will be excited to see if a new jvm actor system emerges as a competitor. Or perhaps a fork.
- I would be excited to see more consideration given to Elixir and OTP, where previously Akka may have been favored.
NC covered works trick people into investing in a dead end.
They can do that, for sure. It is legal and I don’t see reason to complain. You cannot trust a project to stay free if it is licensed without copyleft or requesting that you assign them your code without guaranteeing that it stays free.
Letting my actor's function block was the best bit about Erlang.
Imagine a contributor who's first contribution to Open Source was this project. I am not sure he'd be very happy about a move such as this (or maybe he won't care).
Not a bad thing per se, by the way…
For example, is akka-http [0] part of these changes?
Hopefully someone starts a copyleft fork of the last FOSS version of Akka and drives Lightbend out of business with it.
No it isn't. Releases of Ghostscript are entirely FOSS from day 1. There's a huge difference between a FOSS project that sells exceptions, and a proprietary program that businesses have to buy a license for to use it all.
As it happens, everyone doing free beer software at the kolkhoz isn't sustainable.
I don't care to debate open source or license changes, I care mostly about the developers this affects. I care about the people who I got excited about using the actor model with Akka now having to put in a serious amount of effort to rip it out. Mostly these people are at places I no longer work and just inherited codebases where akka happened to win the particular decision on the project. In most of those projects, it could just as easily have been Spring, or Dropwizard, or Kafka Streams, or dozens of other libraries and frameworks.
For those of you who work for companies that don't have over $25m in revenue, please never choose Akka. A company looking to acquire your company is going to do their due diligence looking for poison pills, and Akka became one of those today. For those of you who work for companies making over $25m in revenue, you probably know that the way scaling works, your company is very likely to have a loss rather than a profit. You're also likely to have lots of people in accounting, and requisition, and many levels of management, and not a single one of them will ever consider $2k per vCPU for even a second.
Most companies that have that much revenue are building on pretty rough margins that have gotten a lot rougher this year, and the expectation from the market is to start showing a profit right away. Many companies are finding smaller margins at the same time, and working with a scale of many tens of thousands of vCPUs running in cloud environments, earning only a small amount above the opEx (or maybe even below) of the cloud bill.
These companies are also likely to have to follow regulations like SOC2 or SOX, and have requirements for patching CVEs, so it isn't an option to just keep the same version of Akka once a CVE has been discovered. This is particularly true if you're using akka-http as those servers might be handling traffic that isn't even going through a WAF. Developers in this situation are going to be absolutely screwed. There's no way the company will justify a license that costs more than the physical hardware something is running on, but there is no way they can just not upgrade, either. Maybe the company decides that it'll license, and only have to lay off 50 people as a result. Maybe the company decides it'll fork and 5 people have to maintain that fork until the company can migrate to something else. I know if I were one of those people, I'd quit. I think the best scenario here is to just drop everything you were doing, and either rewrite your akka components or try to swap in something like ZIO and hope you can complete the project before a big CVE hits.
And if a >8 CVE does hit Akka soon, maybe that would be a good thing, as it might foster the creation of one particular fork that could actually gain traction, rather than a diffuse set of hundreds of forks that never gain critical mass.
Thanks video
Like, when somebody releases something open source, then notice that they can actually make money out of it and they change the license at the last minute. Oh the hypocrisy.
Seriously if you're bothered by people making money out of your product, keep it closed source, nothing wrong with it. On the contrary a plague of the latest years is this pressure that everything should be open source: it doesn't need to. If you're not comfortable with it, keep it closed source.
But if you decide to open source something, keep your promises, no matter what.
I don't understand the sentiment of "once something is OSS, it has to be so forever". They owe you what exactly? More of their free time & money to hold up something you call a "promise" but is just their choice of license made many years ago?
They are being reasonable about it, you still get the source, you can still use it for free on a revenue < $25M. Companies making significant amounts of money now have to pay for it, instead of freeloading.
Its fine to spend your nights and weekends on passions projects when your young, its also fine to demand money for shouldering much of its development when said project grows large many years later and you have obligations towards your family. Its called being an adult.
If I contributed to the project, I did so under the premise of the LICENSE that was active when I contributed. If I didn't like OSS, I wouldn't have contributed to a OSS project. Them changing the license is a middle-finger to me as a contributor.
> Its fine to spend your nights and weekends on passions projects when your young [...] Its called being an adult
With all due respect, fuck you. Equaling "open source" to "young people can waste their time" and "software needs to earn money" to being an adult is a really shitty opinion to put out there.
Me (40+ years old) and many others do open source because we want the world to be about more than just money. Just because you cannot understand that nor want the same thing, doesn't mean that we're wrong and you're right.
The existing codebase stays OSS, and can be forked. The work they put in starting now, is going to be proprietary for three years.
It feels like a stupid change anyways, as companies can just keep using the old OSS version.
Whatever you contributed is still available as OSS (the previous version with the old license). Just fork the project and compete with them if you think you can do it better. Lightbend seems to think they can't keep developing OSS Akka in a way that would make them money and thus the change.
No, you contributed under the premise of the LICENSE that was active when you contributed _and the CLA they made you sign before they accepted your PR_, which said that they're allowed to change the license later on if they feel like it. If you think that the company changing the license for future versions is a middle finger, you shouldn't be contributing to projects that make you sign CLAs.
If you did not like this, you could have chosen to only contribute to projects whose licenses do not permit this, e.g. those licensed under GPL.
Were you unaware of this?
It's legal, yes. If it's nice towards contributors of past versions, is another thing.
Under the GPL, you cannot change the license in a subsequent version. You must continue to license any derivative works, including subsequent versions, under the GPL. If someone wants to ensure that the projects they're contributing to remain open-source, they should limit their contributions to GPL projects!
The Apache license does not require you to license derivative works under the same license.
This is why people have strong opinions about different licenses, because some of them provide stronger guarantees than others. If someone ignored these "details" and is now disappointed that they didn't understand what it meant, I don't think that's anyone's fault but their own.
Presumably all older versions of the software that were Apache licensed remain so. They are switching to BSL (closed, but source available and each revision switches to Apache licensed 3 years later) going forward.
I don't see how this is worse than keeping everything closed source from the start, which is your suggestion? Shouldn't we be thankful for all the work they've done so far for free, and if somebody doesn't like the new licensing model, then they can fork it from the last Apache-licensed version and keep going from there?
Nobody using a free version of any software should expect some benelovent 3rd party to continue fixing bugs and making improvements for free, even if you enjoyed that privilege before.
A thriving OSS project is more than just the software, it's a community. People contribute features and bug fixes upstream so that everyone else can benefit, because in return they also get the benefit of others contributions. It's a body of collective endeavour. There's a social contract.
Taking an established, OSS project and closing it destroys that community. Sure, it's legal, and everyone can continue to use the version they're currently on, but something dies, and trust is broken.
No. If there is a vibrant community of developers, then that community can make the decision to fork. From the OP it seems like there is no community, just enterprise users that do not “give back” open source, which happens.
Even without the community, those enterprise users can create a new community of users to keep the current version maintained.
A similar situation occurs when a library supplier company goes under - which is one risk you take on whenever you depend on a commercially developed library (whether FLOSS or closed).
Here, the project is actually taking part of the community with it, fracturing contributions and the people who work on it. Going back to the car example, it’s like you have a couple of people carpooling and you each take turns buying snacks to share so you’re not hungry during the trip. Now the two people will go in the new car, or their own vehicles, and now you have to buy snacks entirely by yourself, there’s no pooling anymore. This is stretching the analogy a little bit, because you can copy software and not snacks, but a lot of people contribute to open source because, well, if everyone contributes a bit they all benefit from the community pool of code in the future. If I submitted code to this project while it was open source and now to my access to the shared benefits of an open source project is gone, because I have to use the old code pre-relicense, then I’d be kind of upset.
*Name squatting, actively attempting to advertise an unmaintained project, other forms of essentially false advertising nonwithstanding
Changing license mid-flight is an attempt to reap benefits from existing community, but not providing the benefits the old license provided.
This is after 13 years of support not "last minute".
can a business strategy align with some version of the greater good?
how much alignment is needed?
I'm not sure how that would even work with cloud providers, at the worst you would have to pay for the max number of cores you have used in a year (however, it's not even clear what a core is in that context with SMT and preemptable cores).
The same thing has happened several times, especially in the database space. Use the "fake open source" strategy to lure developers and then bait and switch. It's good business, but disingenuous. They remove a core implied premise, akin to a lie. If they were upfront from the beginning regarding eventually cashing in with heavy fees or cutting off contributions, community, etc, then it would be a very different case and there would have been no deception. This is deception.
Can anyone name a recent open source library or program that is widely used and community controlled beside Linux?
Open source now mainly serves as a way for trillion dollar companies to pool resources to develop software they all need and minimize how many developers they need to hire (see Linux).
We have seen again and again how open source developers and maintainers are giving the short end of the stick and have seen over and over again companies try to have make an open source business model and fail. RedHat is basically the exception that proves the rule.
I don't see any problem with that as long as the companies are paying the developers, which they are in most cases. Major open source like Linux and k8s haven't been developed by volunteers for decades.
I guess I miss remembered python I thought it was 93 for some reason, maybe that is java.
I'd answer the opposite question. What do I use in my daily work that isn't open source? Sure there's binary blobs/drivers here and there, and whatever the cloud providers are keeping to themselves.
But c'mon, all the languages, the build tools, web frameworks, libraries, databases (sql and non-sql).