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Comment by kryptiskt | Hacker News Reader

Bait and switch is never nice, whether Google does it or putative open source projects. A lot of developers work for companies that has more than $25M in revenue, and now a ton of them is going to get shit from management because they added this cuckoo egg dependency back when it used an open source license.

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.

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Bait and switch?

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 don't use Akka, but I feel the pain of the people who did that and now has to tear the thing out.

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.

Is it really bait and switch if the company has a contributor/committer license agreement in place?

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.

> Is it really bait and switch if the company has a contributor/committer license agreement in place?

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.

$2k per vCPU is 16k for a pretty standard 8 core ec2. The ec2 itself might cost ~$300 a month or $3600 a year. Where the hell did they come up with this pricing model lol.

This comment is really buried in the discussion. $2000 per vCPU for a library is absolutely insane pricing, unless you're running Akka on a single bare metal server, this is a non-starter for anyone.

Really unsure what Lightbend is trying to do here, this seems like the death of Akka.

> unless you're running Akka on a single bare metal server

A tiny single bear metal server, at that; most server hardware I use has 48 cores!

Running it at Raspberry Pi would cost you 8k.

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.

Sounds like Oracle.

I'm 99% sure they got this pricing model from their current contracts for support contracts with enterprise companies.

>A lot of developers work for companies that has more than $25M in revenue, and now a ton of them is going to get shit from management because they added this cuckoo egg dependency back when it used an open source license.

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.

Like, have you even looked at those prices? $2K per CPU isn't extremely minimal for anybody. If you have a hundred servers with 16 CPUs that's $3M. For just a library.

Speaking of a bunch of leeches.

If you've built your entire company around a single library that does all the heavy lifting and you need a hundred servers with 16 CPUs to run just that, why do you think you're entitled to not pay your fair share for it ? Clearly, you chose Akka because it was valuable enough to allow you to bring your company to that scale.

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.

> Clearly, you chose Akka because it was valuable enough to allow you to bring your company to that scale.

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.

It's a library. I don't need hundreds of servers to run the library. I need hundreds of servers to run the applications that have it as a dependency.

Imagine if something like gRPC was priced like that.

Yeah, or spring (vmware), or guava (google), or react (facebook), or dozens of other common dependencies.

Thankfully I have managed to avoid Akka in our products but the precedent being set here is worrisome.

It’s usurious to charge $3 million for the privilege of making $25 million?

What is a not-leech price for critical infrastructure that allows you to generate $25 million? $1?

> I don't use Akka, but I feel the pain of the people who did that and now has to tear the thing out.

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.

> 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.

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.

Indeed, and that's predatory behavior and it hurts the open source community because of the mistrust it sows.

Bad news. And people here are asking where's the bait and switch? Amazing.

Technically they make a lot of revenue. The $25M threshold isn't a threshold on profitability, just company size. They could be losing money.

It's funny to see how HN flipped on this subject. My company was stung by Handsontable switching to a proprietary license https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488642 and the top comment back in 2019 was "Great to hear".

Your company wasn't stung by it. You chose to get stung by it. Just pin your version and live with it. If it's such a critical piece of your business, either pay a fair price for it, or make it yourself.

So you are basically saying "don't use open source software". Great.

"Pinning your version" forever isn't a viable strategy in lots of cases.

No, I'm saying to not be a leech.

I apologize, my reply was uncharitable. You are right that private companies should stop being leeches and give back to the community.

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.

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