It seems like Lightbend have decided themselves to redefine what "Open Source" means for them, a slight warning sign of whats to come.
> Sadly, open source is prone to the infamous “Tragedy of the commons”, [...] This situation is not sustainable and one in which everyone eventually loses.
> So what does sustainable open source look like? I believe it’s where everyone—users and developers—contributes and are in it together, sharing accountability and ownership.
> This means that companies using the software for profit need to give something back, either code, documentation, community work, or money. In sustainable open source, participants feel the need and moral obligation to contribute.
They even go so far to say they believe BSL to be Open Source, which means they fundamentally misunderstand the idea behind Open Source:
> We believe the BSL 1.1 with our open source grants and Apache re-license is a form of productive and sustainable open source.
They also seem to not know of any big Apache projects that are sustainable, even though there are many examples out in the wild. Apparently none of those projects are sustainable, just because Lightbend didn't manage to actually get major contributors to their own project?
> Apache 2.0 is a very liberal license well suited for early, small open source projects establishing community.
> With Akka now considered critical infrastructure for many large organizations, the Apache 2.0 model becomes increasingly risky when a small company solely carries the maintenance effort.
Just because you didn't manage to build a company around a Open Source library/ecosystem, doesn't mean Open Source is not sustainable. It just means that your company is not sustainable. But I guess it's hard to blame yourself when you see others using your code without paying for it.
It is open source for me as I will never earn more than US $25 million in annual revenue. If I ever do, I will gladly pay them.
I disagree with the idea that the only correct definition of open source is the one that favors big tech monopolists.
Times have changed compared to when the open source movement started. Not many people would have imagined that the monopolists would weaponize open source like they do now. They are not the first company to adapt their license to the changing circumstances, see Elastic.
> Not many people would have imagined that the monopolists would weaponize open source like they do now.
What do you think "weaponize open source" means? It doesn't look like it means a thing, and lounds like a poor attempt at shoehorning "weapon" in a discussion on how a potential user's income is something noteworthy.
The cloud giants have gigantic moats in terms of infrastructure, marketing, process, and so on.
Traditionally, one of the best paths for an upstart company to challenge an established giant was to develop superior technology. Indeed, this is how some of the cloud giants themselves got their start against the dinosaurs of the day.
But in a tech culture where open source is not just common but expected, this path is severely hampered. A lot of tech users won't even consider your fancy new technology if it isn't open source, but if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs.
This is what "Microsoft loves open source" means. When they had the (commercially) superior tech, they disparaged open source as nonsense so they wouldn't be asked to share. Twenty years later, when they realized that there was more and better tech out there than they could hope to produce, they aligned and supported that very ideology so that "we have Redis" or "we have Akka" wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore.
Ultimately, it's a twist on the old "commodify your competition".
> if it is, then the giants can put it on their platform and make your customers into theirs.
The AGPL already solves this. Whatever secret sauce the giants add to do that, you can just take it and add it back to your original program.
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".
The AGPL does nothing to prevent that. They aren't modifying Akka, they're just running it on a superior platform.
One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL, the one the MongoDB guys came up with.
> One license that does force the giants to share (the software part of) their secret sauce exists and is called SSPL
That's exactly what the AGPL does. You just claimed it doesn't prevent cloud providers from running the software at low cost on their own datacentres.
The AGPL only covers modification to the software itself. So Amazon can take free code, sell it as a slickly-packaged service, and not need to share anything.
The SSPL says that if they do so, they need to share the code they use to make it run as a service.
They still retain their massive hardware and organizational advantages, but it does mean that at least every user has access to the code to make their "Akka Service" as good as Amazon's.
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.