[TylerJewell]

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.

[bdangubic]

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?

[TylerJewell]

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.

[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.