Comment by tombert

Wow, thank you very much for your reply, especially for how polite it was when I was decidedly impolite. I sympathize with how hard it is to make money in the software world, and I know absolutely nothing about business so of course take whatever I say with a boulder of salt.

That said, and I realize that this is crass but it's also honest: Akka's profitability isn't my problem. When I am looking to import a library for my job, I try my best to weigh pros and cons of each (as we all do), and when I see a BUSL that's an immediate red flag; if Akka were the only cool concurrency library in the JVM world then I'd just put up with it, but when there are viable alternatives like Vert.x it's extremely hard to go to my employer and ask them to spend $5000/month + $0.15/Akka-hour [1], especially since we run thousands of individual JVMs, and running a comparable thing in Vert.x cost us nothing (albeit with having to do tech support ourselves). Whether or not it's "fair" that Vert.x is a pet project from Red Hat or VMWare and therefore doesn't have to worry about financing is sort of orthogonal to whether or not I choose it or Akka.

This isn't meant to shit on Akka, it's very cool software, I'm just frustrated by the BUSL because it gives the illusion of an OSS license, the initial marketing around it looked like an OSS license, and I wasted about 15 hours writing some Akka code only to realize that I had to throw it away because there was no chance I was going to get my employer to approve a PR with BUSL-licensed libraries that would have cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Again, apologies that this is rude, and if Akka/Lightbend/Typesafe is making a profit then of course all the best to you, but this is just my rationale.

[1] https://akka.io/pricing

ETA:

Re-reading this, I apologize for how hostile I come off. You're not trying to sell me, you're just giving justification, which is fine even if I'm not a huge fan of the license.