We Are Changing the License for Akka

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  • Akka

    Build highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM

    > So Amazon can take free code, sell it as a slickly-packaged service, and not need to share anything.

    Right, because they didn't change it. So what would there be to share anyway? 'Go to https://github.com/akka/akka'?

    > but it does mean that at least every user has access to the code to make their "Akka Service" as good as Amazon's.

    That code is meaningless. In this scenario we already established that Amazon is selling an unmodified copy of Akka as a Service (which, by the way, we will revisit this point later). And we already established, in your own words, that it's not about the code:

    > Their secret sauce is "we have a Borg Cube's worth of datacenters, so we can run the same code as you at a lower price".

    So what would the SSPL require, they publish their deployment scripts to their cloud datacentres? Like I said, that's meaningless.

    > "Akka Service"

    Final point. There's no such thing as an 'Akka Service'. Akka is a bunch of libraries. You link it into your JVM application. You don't run Akka separately, so by definition you can't offer it as a service (even if you're Amazon).

    Hence my suggestion of AGPL, and heck let's be generous, let's add a commercial use exception for businesses with less than $20m revenue, similar to what they're doing now with the BSL. Except with my suggestion the software would stay as strong copyleft, most businesses would be happy with the commercial use exception, and a few would have to pay their fair share.

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32751373

  • Akka HTTP

    The Streaming-first HTTP server/module of Akka

    Is it clear which exact OSS components will get the license change?

    For example, is akka-http [0] part of these changes?

    [0] https://github.com/akka/akka-http

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    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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