Comment by tombert
4 days ago
Thanks for the warning.
I nearly made the mistake of merging Akka into a codebase recently; fortunately I double-checked the license and noticed it was the bullshit BUSL and it would have potentially cost my employer tens of thousands of dollars a year [1]. I ended up switching everything to Vert.x, but I really hate how normalized these ostensibly open source projects are sneaking scary expensive licenses into things now.
[1] Yes I'm aware of Pekko now, and my stuff probably would have worked with Pekko, but I didn't really want to deal with something that by design is 3 years out of date.
IMO, you made a good decision ditching akka. We have an akka app before the BUSL and it is a PITA to maintain.
Vert.x and other frameworks are far better and easier for most devs to grok.
> We have an akka app before the BUSL and it is a PITA to maintain
I would imaging the non-Scala use case to be less than ideal.
In Scala land, Pekko - the open source fork of Akka is the way to go if you need compatibility. Personally, I'd avoid new versions of Akka like the plague, and just use more modern alternatives to Pekko/Akka anyway.
I'm not sure what Lightbend's target market is? Maybe they think they have enough critical mass to merit the price tag for companies like Sony/Netflix/Lyft, etc. But they've burnt their bridge right into the water with everyone else, so I see them fading into irrelevance over the next few years.
I actually do have some decision-making power in regards to what tech I use for my job [1] at a mid-size (by tech standards) company, and my initial plan was to use Akka for the thing I was working on, since it more or less fit into the actor model perfectly.
I'm sure that Lightbend feels that their support contract is the bee's knees and worth whatever they charge for it, but it's a complete non-starter for me, and so I look elsewhere.
Vert.x actor-ish model is a bit different, but it's not the that different, and considering that Vert.x tends to perform extremely well in benchmarks, it doesn't really feel like I'm losing a lot by using it instead of Akka, particularly since I'm not using Akka Streams.
[1] Normal disclaimer: I don't hide my employment history, and it's not hard to find, but I politely ask that you do not post it here.
I've found actors (Akka specifically) to be a great model when you have concurrent access to fine grained shared state. It provides such a simple mental model of how to serialize that access. I'm not a fan as a general programming model or even as a general purpose concurrent programming model.
Vert.x has the "Verticle" abstraction, which more or less corresponds to something like an Actor. It's close enough to where I don't feel like I'm missing much by using it instead of Akka.
What are your criticisms of actors as a general purpose concurrent programming model?
Yeah, Vert.x actually ended up being pretty great. I feel like it gives me most of the cool features of Akka that I actually care about, but it allows you to gradually move into it; it can be a full-on framework, but it can also just be a decent library to handle concurrency.
Plus the license isn't stupid.
>it was the bullshit BUSL
I didn't know the licence and had a look, but I don't see what is bullshit with it. It's not a classical open source licence, but pretty close and much better than closed source
> and it would have potentially cost my employer tens of thousands of dollars a year
If your employer is not providing its software open source, there is nothing shocking to have to pay for the software used
> I didn't know the licence and had a look, but I don't see what is bullshit with it.
I just think it's a proprietary license that is trying to LARP as an OSS license. It sneaks in language that makes it so it's unclear how much it will actually cost you to use it. It makes me terrified to import anything touching it because I don't want to risk accidentally costing my employer millions of dollars.
I don't really see how it's "pretty close" to an OSS license. Part of an OSS license is that I can use the code for whatever I want, which is decidedly not the case with BUSL. I do appreciate that stuff eventually becomes Apache, so I guess that's better than nothing, but I'd rather just avoid the stuff entirely, or only use the Apache licensed stuff.
I also don't really like the idea that I could contribute to Akka, have my contributions being monetized by Lightbend, but I'm not even allowed to use my own contributions without paying them a fee. I know that CLAs aren't exactly new in the OSS world, but at least if I were to make a contribution to Ubuntu, I'm still allowed to run Ubuntu server for free, with my contributions included.
I guess the license just kind of feels "Bait and Switch" to me. It tries to get you to think that it's OSS and then smacks you with a "JK IT'S PROPRIETARY".
> If your employer is not providing its software open source, there is nothing shocking to have to pay for the software used
Sure, except in the case of Akka there's enough competition in the Java library world that I don't think that it's worth it. Vert.x is comparable, and the license is less likely to accidentally cost me lots of money.
I mostly think that Akka's licensing is way too expensive too, again especially when you consider that there's a good chunk of concurrency libraries in Java-land that have more business-friendly licenses.
I am the CEO of Akka, formerly Lightbend.
We did a long podcast and a couple blogs that offered transparency to the rationale on why we moved from Apache to BSL, which still downgrades to Apache after 36 months. See Emily Omier for the specifics.
It came down to survival. The company faced a bankruptcy event as customers were using the software without contributions and after exhausting alternatives needed to change the license model to create a more sustainable approach.
The consequence of this choice was that there was less adoption from OSS and ISVs who need a flexible licensing model for embedding and redistribution. It also encouraged the Pekko fork which is a branch that is 2.5 years old. And that branch helped older projects and OSS distributions to maintain their position without financial consequences.
It is not cheap to maintain Akka, and after 15 years we have turned a profit, albeit barely. We are growing, finally, and have a prosperous future and most of our spend goes into development. It did allow us to create Akka 3, which is a simpler model for devs within enterprises mixed with a consumption based model that should be significantly cheaper than the traditional libraries, and cheaper than the cost to adopt most any other framework. We can debate the merits of different business models but we couldn't have maintained the 50 CVE fixes and create a modern version of Akka if we hadn't taken this step.
We need a better strategy on how to appeal to the OSS community once more. To appeal to startups and academics, we have free commercial licenses and subscriptions, which nearly 200 accounts have signed up in the last 18 months.
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