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Comment by a_c | Hacker News Reader

I had used akka several years before for a commercial project. It worked wonder for me. Personally I have no issue with their change of license. Author has authority, as simple as that. I'm willing to pay for something useful. People seem to take a moral high ground when it comes to software.

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.

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The "moral high ground" is a recognition of the true dynamic in open source.

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.

I view open source as a key question around maintainability, and access to talent with experience.

When I see open source projects getting relicensed, I automatically assume there is some monetization campaign underway which exploits the community's contributions.

People who give their labor away for free aren’t entitled to anything. They should stop engaging in the farce that is open source these days if they feel that strongly about it

I think it's simpler than that, just from their relicensing FAQ: https://www.lightbend.com/akka/license-faq

> 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.

Yep, they couldn’t say: ‘we thought about relicensing but given a few people on HN would be upset about it we just decided it’s better to shut shop.’

The real question is wether they will actually generate more revenue with the change or perhaps less. There's always some fork on the old licence and it wouldn't be the first time that the fork eventually surpasses the original. Even amongst those who paid for support before the change, some might not be willing to commit to a future of not having a choice.

> organizations have elected to self-support

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.

> They need money to continue development, and the current model isn't generating enough revenue for them to stay in business.

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.

There are many reasons to be open source. To solve actual problem, to engage with developer, to solicit ideas, to invite public audit, to gain publicity, among many other reasons. I respect and admire all the people who decides to create, open source or not. Author bear all the consequences of their actions, open source or not. Contributions are not all equal, some people might feel more entitled because they made significant contribution in a project. The same people are also those who are most capable of forking. Do it by all means.

I am grateful that open source projects exist. But their "turning around" doesn't make me less grateful.

The code that community contributed remains open source, you generally can not retroactively make stuff not-open. What Akka here is doing is removing themselves from the open source project and making their further contributions closed. The open source community is free to continue as they want.

> If they changed their mind later to make the project proprietary, still full respect.

If "they" doesn't include all previous contributors, I can see an argument to the contrary.

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