Lightbend’s Akka shifts from Apache 2.0 license to BSL 1.1 – but critics not pleased about pricing
Lightbend is fed up with commercial entities using its open source wares in production environments and giving nothing back to the FOSS community, so is making an alteration to the licensing of a popular product.
The license for Akka – Lightbend’s library for creating concurrent and fault tolerant applications – is moving from Apache 2.0 to version 1.1 of the Business Source License originally created by MySQL founders David Axmark and Monty Widenius and used by MySQL fork MariaDB and CockroachDB, among others.
As described by MariaDB, it is a “new alternative to closed source or open core licensing models.”
Akka is the runtime for thousands of products, according to Jonas Bonér, CEO and founder of Lightbend and creator of the Akka project. He said it is used by well known businesses including Apple, Disney, GM, HPE, Starbuck and Tesla.
The library was ahead of its time in some ways when it was released 13 years ago, he wrote in a blog. It includes an actor-based programming model that used concepts like asynchronous messaging and computation, event logging and more, he added.
It “provided an ideal programming model for cloud computing years before it was even on most companies’ radar” said Bonér, claiming that industry has since played catchup to the software’s “reactive principles of design.”
“With the rise of edge computing, Akka’s model natively allows for building systems of services with millions of efficient, autonomous, mobile, self-organizing, self-healing, and location transparent services (actors) is an even better fit,” he wrote.
