Lightbend, the developer of Akka, recently announced that they are moving from a free open-source model to a paid business license.
Akka is a popular application development tool. Akka allows developers to run heavy-duty distributed apps, making it ideal for developers building programs in Scala and Java. Lightbend has now decided to change its licensing model to help its biggest user contribute more towards the platform’s development.
According to a recent report by Lightbend, Akka is shifting from an open-source platform to a business source platform, essentially making it a paid platform.
Lightbend Akka license change
Akka has served developers for years and gained wide popularity. That being said, an open-source platform can only thrive if the community contributes to it. The problem with open-source platforms arises when organizations depend on them for daily operations and choose to self-support the platform instead of contributing.
To avoid this, Akka has moved away from the Apache 2.0 source license to a business source license, requiring organizations that make annual revenue of over $25 million to pay for the license and a subscription fee.
In light of this change, Lighbend CEO Jonas Bonér said: “This will enable Akka to remain at the forefront of building innovative solutions that many globally recognized brands use to build and run some of their most critical applications.”
Time will tell how this move impacts Lightbend and Akka. The community is split over the change. While most organizations have been using this platform for free to run their daily operations, the community seems to understand the impact of the lack of contribution towards the platform itself.
13 hours ago
