Open source: Lightbend responds to critics of Akka licence change
Accusations of 'cakeism' and 'marketing' unfair, says SVP Strategy & Product Brad Murdoch
San Francisco-based software vendor Lightbend this week shifted away from open source licencing in the shape of Apache 2.0 in favour of so-called 'source available' licencing for Akka, a popular Java middleware project.
As Computing reported, Akka is now covered by Business Source Licence (BSL) v1.1. Briefly, the upshot of the decision is that organisations earning more than US$25 million in annual revenue will need to pay for production usage of Akka and its modules. In an unusual move, the code will revert to Apache 2.0 after three years, but Lightbend will not allow backporting of BSL-licenced code to the older codebase.
BSL is not a recognised open source licence, and Lightbend came in for some criticism for, as one commenter put it, trying to have its cake and eat it: calling itself ‘sustainable open source' while in fact using a proprietary licence. Another said the company used open source as a marketing tool while flipping to proprietary, and that trying to reframe the definition of open source is damaging to the model as a whole.
See also: Vendors abandoning open source licencing accused of cakeism
Lightbend's answers to our questions came in too late for the article, but Brad Murdoch, EVP Strategy and Product at Lightbend, has since responded, together with a rejoinder to the 'cakeism' criticisms (although not the accusation of damaging open source; we have requested further comment on this point).
Response to ‘cakeism' accusation
We believe the characterisation of our decision to move to a BSL as "cakeism" or "marketing" is unfair. We accept that this is a departure from the traditional open source model and we make no claim that this approach is ideal for all firms. However, what is clear is that Akka's future is dependent on Lightbend taking this step.
What's more, it's critical to keep two things in mind that seem to be glossed over by many of those responding to this news. First, for the vast majority of developers and organisations, nothing will fundamentally change with this decision. Second, for those businesses above the $25 million annual revenue threshold using Akka, we're confident they will be able to afford our very reasonable fees.
What were the circumstances that led you to change the licensing of Akka from Apache 2.0 to BSL 1.1?
Primarily, it was the trend of our very large users making the decision to support Akka themselves without relying on Lightbend. Many are firms making billions of dollars in profits, but not contributing to the development of the technology that, in many cases, is the foundation for their mission-critical applications. Instead, they expected the community and us to fulfil this function for free. It's not rocket science to understand that is a model that is unsustainable for Akka as an ongoing technology.
What are the lessons you have taken from other projects that have taken a similar route in the past few years?
First and foremost, that it is eminently possible to take this route and continue to grow and innovate. MongoDB, Cockroach Labs, Redis, Elastic … all of these firms have taken a similar strategy and continue to grow. Lightbend is not the first, nor will it be the last.
Why was $25 million chosen as the cut-off point for free use?
Based on a review of our own customer base, this threshold provides a good balance between enabling companies in startup mode to continue to take advantage of Akka while giving us the resources we needed to continue to innovate from customers that could afford to contribute.
Why have you decided to restrict backporting?
Like most software projects, we want to maintain as close to a single current branch as possible. We do backporting today out of necessity for some of our paying customers and that will continue to be the case. However, the best way to move the project forward is with a current codebase. Commercially speaking, if we backported all the fixes to the current Apache-licenced version, there would be limited incentive to move to the latest version.
Having said that, we are committing to fix any genuinely critical bugs and vulnerabilities in the current codebase for a period of 12 months to allow an appropriate time for migration planning.
Do you foresee any problems with your code not being recognised as open source?
No. Firstly it is source available and free for anyone to look at, learn from, and develop with. Secondly, the code reverts to a full Apache 2.0 licence after three years so it will be fully open source again.
We understand that some percentage of organisations using Akka will look for an alternative. That is, by far, the biggest risk of our new strategy and we took that into consideration before making this decision. However, anecdotally, we have already had some customers state they were no longer going to use Akka, only to come back to us once they realise its importance to their current infrastructure.
We will have to wait and see how this unfolds.