It's not just about revenue generation. I bet they are doing this to prevent Amazon from deploying a version of Akka as a service on AWS.
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.
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.