Hi Eero,

Pleasure to bask in your love, as always!

At Percona we always acknowledged we’re staying on the shoulders of the giants. We extend and improve their work and we give results back to community as Open Source software. I understand you feel bitter with us making money with honest work and might be think Open Source should be written by selfless unpaid volunteers ?

When it comes to Galera technology we took every step possible to work with the project while serving our community and customers and only came to maintain our own fork as last resort.

I think you see Open Source software too much as one sided relationships where users get “free stuff” and get nothing in return. In reality though strong communities are what make Open Source Projects successful in its early days, so the other side of this relationship is Akka has become popular because of the quid-pro-quo relationship with its community who were getting software for “free” but when making it successful. Now this balance is broken.

It will be interesting to see if Akka community comes together to execute fork. I’m running a Poll on twitter to see what people think

https://twitter.com/PeterZaitsev/status/1568235268183834625

With BSL it is not question of loving it, but rather the fact it is Source Available License, which is fundamentally different from Open Source and what I hate when parties try to pretend otherwise.

The narrative of “everyone below $25M gets it free so only fat cats who have lots of money have to pay” misses key point – license change to non Open Source license puts every Open Source project which chose to embed Akka in precarious situation – they no more can distribute their project as Open Source. Note if they have multiple components they might not even have a choice to adopt Akka’s BSL variation. Here is one article on this topic:

https://flink.apache.org/news/2022/09/08/akka-license-change.html

Finally “It will be available as Apache 2.0 in 3 years” may look good on paper in reality though by that time it tends to be outdated and unmaintained code which is unsafe to use from security standpoint.

It never ceases me to be amazed how self-serving you are on your own open source quest. Granted, you and Percona have done a lot for the open source communities, and MySQL specifically, with the projects Percona has developed (and benefitted through consulting and support agreements.)

But obviously, it always remains in your best interest to have various open source projects available for you to raid and try to take over, such as Galera, instead of actively supporting these projects to become self-sustaining in their own right.

What comes to Lightbend Akka, I believe that they did a very sensible thing. They have provided free software for multiple parties for many years. All users/customers should be happy with the free solutions they got as long as they get. They should not gripe that they should pay a reasonable amount against the value they receive. going forward

Converting into BSL licenses (I guess this stands in your mind as a ‘bullshit’ license? But Monty and David helped to create Business Source License for a reason) helps open source providers protect their future and gain more funds for future development. Fair deal?

And the fact that it includes carveouts for small companies (less than $25M annual revenue grants a free license for the startups) and automatic conversion to Apache 2.0 after three years looks pretty generous.