Ask HN: Akka fork – who would be willing to contribute? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Akka fork – who would be willing to contribute?

8 pointssebaz6r10 comments

Akka changed their license to BSL. Many FOSS projects rely on Akka (e.g. Play Framework, Apache Flink) and are therefore forced to lock the Akka version to the last Apache Licence 2.0 release or replace Akka.

It would be the best for these FOSS projects to have a reliable Akka fork (focused on bug fixing and long term stability).

Who would be willing to contribute to an Akka fork (financial contribution, development or organisational aspects)?

Are there already ongoing initiatives for an Akka fork?

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Offtopic, I've never heard of Akka, going to the page https://www.lightbend.com/akka/ didn't help either..

> Akka provides the building blocks that make it easy for businesses to build, deploy, and run large-scale applications that support digitally transformative initiatives.

Fucking hell, buzzwords galore. Scrolling down it didn't get better, it's all just marketing blah blah.

It’s a streaming (well, actor, but I see it most often used in the streaming context) framework that is pretty well known in the Scala world. It’s pretty robust, and like the comment says, it’s used as the underlying engine for a good amount of high performance Scala and Java frameworks.

Play, which is the pretty much de facto Scala web framework, uses it pretty religiously.

On https://akka.io or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akka_(toolkit) you get a better idea of what Akka is.

I used Akka many (10?) years ago and back then the landing page and documentation was amazing. It was super clear what it did and why it's necessary. I really enjoyed using it. I'm sad to see such a good project being mismanaged so badly because someone needed to build a company around it.

I think 90% of the community will gladly jump ship when a fork materializes. (We will for sure). The question is,who has the firepower to take the lead.

A fellowship of the actor between Tesla, Disney and Wall Street?

It wouldn't need massive innovation. Just security fixes and some natural evolution. E.g. HTTP3 etc. That could now be really community driven.

One does wonder if the new work should be covered by LGPL V3, as a BSL protective countermeasure.

I guess, to not sabotage Flink MPL v2 is a better suited candidate.

From their FAQ [1]

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

1. https://www.lightbend.com/akka/license-faq

Also after 3 years the BSL changes into apache

Thank you for referring to the Lightbend license FAQ. These use grants under the BSL are very limited - here the additional use grant for the Play Framework:

"If you develop an application using a version of Play Framework that utilizes binary versions of akka-streams and its dependencies, you may use such binary versions of akka-streams and its dependencies in the development of your application only as they are incorporated into Play Framework and solely to implement the functionality provided by Play Framework; provided that, they are only used in the following way: Connecting to a Play Framework websocket and/or Play Framework request/response bodies for server and play-ws client."

This won't really work because many projects based on the Play Framework use more Akka features than those granted.

Something is brewing at Apache!!! https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-29281

I created a similar post on the scala subreddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/xjfoa3/akka_fork

Upvotes appreciated.

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