Comment by TylerJewell
9 hours ago
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.
What would you say is the main difference between your and other products that do not use BSL?
Surely it is also not cheap to maintain Spring Framework either, no?
Well, Vert.x and Spring are maintained by RedHat and Broadcom. Both of those companies measure their profit and loss tied to their broader orchestration and platform sales (Kubernetes). They fund app dev frameworks only to the degree they can drive profitable adoption of their other commercial offerings. Broadcom, in particular, after the VMW acquisition has trimmed their staffing in areas that do not directly impact the Tanzu bottom line. Not all Vert.x and Spring customers need or desire that coupling, and so that poses an interesting dynamic that is different from us.
We are a pure play app dev platform and that gets to the heart of why the business model is different. I'd argue that we are very motivated to make sure that customers are successful with app dev as that is our bottom line where our rivals are financially incentives by infrastructure sales, not app dev outcomes.