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Comment by keewee7 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Akka an important component in various Scala projects like Apache Spark? What are they supposed to do?

Other libraries depending on Akka shouldn't have to change, as they are merely published as "libraries", not deployed to "production".

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.

And if the library using akka is in production? Presumably then fees time, as otherwise a thin shim called 'akkalib' that forwards calls would be an escape hatch.

I guess that depends if other libraries are fine with only having commercial users willing to pay that much for using Akka. (E.g. since GP mentioned Spark, doesn't that have quite a commercial ecosystem around it that probably won't be happy to suddenly pay thousands per node extra?)

Clearly the OSS developers don't have to pay something per core. The risk would be that anyone with a production Spark or Flink cluster now has to license Akka, e.g. those products are themselves not open source anymore.

Akka's new license is highly likely incompatible with the Apache Software Foundation requirements for third party licenses. "Additional use grant" might mean a OSS project does not have to pay, but it still puts heavy restrictions on forking that project.

So Apache projects depending on Akka, like Flink or Spark, will probably have to fork it or be stuck on the current version.

Spark doesn’t use Akka since 1.6.

Akka is an ecosystem on its own. There's no Akka in Spark, Flink, Kafka, nor at the other end of the Scala spectrum, in FP libraries in the Typelevel or Zio ecosystems.

Akka is a part of Play though, which has been abandoned by Lightbend.

So iiuc code using the play framework is permitted to use akka (because it's built on top of it) without paying?

What do you mean no Akka in Flink ? https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/master/flink-rpc/flink-...

Thanks, I stand corrected.

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