Thanks for the warning.

I nearly made the mistake of merging Akka into a codebase recently; fortunately I double-checked the license and noticed it was the bullshit BUSL and it would have potentially cost my employer tens of thousands of dollars a year [1]. I ended up switching everything to Vert.x, but I really hate how normalized these ostensibly open source projects are sneaking scary expensive licenses into things now.

[1] Yes I'm aware of Pekko now, and my stuff probably would have worked with Pekko, but I didn't really want to deal with something that by design is 3 years out of date.

IMO, you made a good decision ditching akka. We have an akka app before the BUSL and it is a PITA to maintain.

Vert.x and other frameworks are far better and easier for most devs to grok.

> We have an akka app before the BUSL and it is a PITA to maintain

I would imaging the non-Scala use case to be less than ideal.

In Scala land, Pekko - the open source fork of Akka is the way to go if you need compatibility. Personally, I'd avoid new versions of Akka like the plague, and just use more modern alternatives to Pekko/Akka anyway.

I'm not sure what Lightbend's target market is? Maybe they think they have enough critical mass to merit the price tag for companies like Sony/Netflix/Lyft, etc. But they've burnt their bridge right into the water with everyone else, so I see them fading into irrelevance over the next few years.

I actually do have some decision-making power in regards to what tech I use for my job [1] at a mid-size (by tech standards) company, and my initial plan was to use Akka for the thing I was working on, since it more or less fit into the actor model perfectly.

I'm sure that Lightbend feels that their support contract is the bee's knees and worth whatever they charge for it, but it's a complete non-starter for me, and so I look elsewhere.

Vert.x actor-ish model is a bit different, but it's not the that different, and considering that Vert.x tends to perform extremely well in benchmarks, it doesn't really feel like I'm losing a lot by using it instead of Akka, particularly since I'm not using Akka Streams.

[1] Normal disclaimer: I don't hide my employment history, and it's not hard to find, but I politely ask that you do not post it here.

I've found actors (Akka specifically) to be a great model when you have concurrent access to fine grained shared state. It provides such a simple mental model of how to serialize that access. I'm not a fan as a general programming model or even as a general purpose concurrent programming model.

Vert.x has the "Verticle" abstraction, which more or less corresponds to something like an Actor. It's close enough to where I don't feel like I'm missing much by using it instead of Akka.

What are your criticisms of actors as a general purpose concurrent programming model?

Yeah, Vert.x actually ended up being pretty great. I feel like it gives me most of the cool features of Akka that I actually care about, but it allows you to gradually move into it; it can be a full-on framework, but it can also just be a decent library to handle concurrency.

Plus the license isn't stupid.

>it was the bullshit BUSL

I didn't know the licence and had a look, but I don't see what is bullshit with it. It's not a classical open source licence, but pretty close and much better than closed source

> and it would have potentially cost my employer tens of thousands of dollars a year

If your employer is not providing its software open source, there is nothing shocking to have to pay for the software used

> I didn't know the licence and had a look, but I don't see what is bullshit with it.

I just think it's a proprietary license that is trying to LARP as an OSS license. It sneaks in language that makes it so it's unclear how much it will actually cost you to use it. It makes me terrified to import anything touching it because I don't want to risk accidentally costing my employer millions of dollars.

I don't really see how it's "pretty close" to an OSS license. Part of an OSS license is that I can use the code for whatever I want, which is decidedly not the case with BUSL. I do appreciate that stuff eventually becomes Apache, so I guess that's better than nothing, but I'd rather just avoid the stuff entirely, or only use the Apache licensed stuff.

I also don't really like the idea that I could contribute to Akka, have my contributions being monetized by Lightbend, but I'm not even allowed to use my own contributions without paying them a fee. I know that CLAs aren't exactly new in the OSS world, but at least if I were to make a contribution to Ubuntu, I'm still allowed to run Ubuntu server for free, with my contributions included.

I guess the license just kind of feels "Bait and Switch" to me. It tries to get you to think that it's OSS and then smacks you with a "JK IT'S PROPRIETARY".

> If your employer is not providing its software open source, there is nothing shocking to have to pay for the software used

Sure, except in the case of Akka there's enough competition in the Java library world that I don't think that it's worth it. Vert.x is comparable, and the license is less likely to accidentally cost me lots of money.

I mostly think that Akka's licensing is way too expensive too, again especially when you consider that there's a good chunk of concurrency libraries in Java-land that have more business-friendly licenses.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Important to upvote this. If there's room for improvement for Polars (which I'm sure there is), go and support the project. But don't fall for a commercial trap when there are competent open source tools available.

No shade to the juggernaut of the open source software movement and everything it has/will enabled, but why the hate for a project that required people’s time and knowledge to create something useful to a segment of users and then expect to charge for using it in the future? Commercial trap seems to imply this is some sort of evil machination but it seems like they are being quite upfront with that language.

It's not hate for the project, it's hate for the deceptive rollout.

Basically it's a debate about how many dark patterns can you squeeze next to that "upfront language" before "marketing" slides into "bait-n-switch."

Not sure if evil or not, but it is unprofessional to use a tool that you dont know how much it will cost for your company in the future.

While I agree, it's worth noting that this project is a drop-in replacement (they claim that, at least), but Polars has a very different API. I much prefer Polars's API, but it's still a non-trivial cost to switch to it, which is why many people would instead explore Pandas alternatives instead.

I thought I saw on the documentation that it was released under the modified BSD license. I guess they could take future versions closed source, but the current version should be available for folks to use and further develop.

It's just the binary that's BSD, not the source code. The source code is unavailable.

I don't trust their benchmarks. I ran their benchmarks source locally on my machine TPCH scale 10. Polars was orders of magnitudes faster and didn't SIGABORT at query 10 (I wasn't OOM).

    (.venv) [fireducks]  ritchie46 /home/ritchie46/Downloads/deleteme/polars-tpch[SIGINT] $ SCALE_FACTOR=10.0 make run-polars
    .venv/bin/python -m queries.polars
    {"scale_factor":10.0,"paths":{"answers":"data/answers","tables":"data/tables","timings":"output/run","timings_filename":"timings.csv","plots":"output/plot"},"plot":{"show":false,"n_queries":7,"y_limit":null},"run":{"io_type":"parquet","log_timings":false,"show_results":false,"check_results":false,"polars_show_plan":false,"polars_eager":false,"polars_streaming":false,"modin_memory":8000000000,"spark_driver_memory":"2g","spark_executor_memory":"1g","spark_log_level":"ERROR","include_io":true},"dataset_base_dir":"data/tables/scale-10.0"}
    Code block 'Run polars query 1' took: 1.47103 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 2' took: 0.09870 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 3' took: 0.53556 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 4' took: 0.38394 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 5' took: 0.69058 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 6' took: 0.25951 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 7' took: 0.79158 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 8' took: 0.82241 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 9' took: 1.67873 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 10' took: 0.74836 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 11' took: 0.18197 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 12' took: 0.63084 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 13' took: 1.26718 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 14' took: 0.94258 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 15' took: 0.97508 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 16' took: 0.25226 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 17' took: 2.21445 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 18' took: 3.67558 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 19' took: 1.77616 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 20' took: 1.96116 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 21' took: 6.76098 s
    Code block 'Run polars query 22' took: 0.32596 s
    Code block 'Overall execution of ALL polars queries' took: 34.74840 s
    (.venv) [fireducks]  ritchie46 /home/ritchie46/Downloads/deleteme/polars-tpch$ SCALE_FACTOR=10.0 make run-fireducks
    .venv/bin/python -m queries.fireducks
    {"scale_factor":10.0,"paths":{"answers":"data/answers","tables":"data/tables","timings":"output/run","timings_filename":"timings.csv","plots":"output/plot"},"plot":{"show":false,"n_queries":7,"y_limit":null},"run":{"io_type":"parquet","log_timings":false,"show_results":false,"check_results":false,"polars_show_plan":false,"polars_eager":false,"polars_streaming":false,"modin_memory":8000000000,"spark_driver_memory":"2g","spark_executor_memory":"1g","spark_log_level":"ERROR","include_io":true},"dataset_base_dir":"data/tables/scale-10.0"}
    Code block 'Run fireducks query 1' took: 5.35801 s
    Code block 'Run fireducks query 2' took: 8.51291 s
    Code block 'Run fireducks query 3' took: 7.04319 s
    Code block 'Run fireducks query 4' took: 19.60374 s
    Code block 'Run fireducks query 5' took: 28.53868 s
    Code block 'Run fireducks query 6' took: 4.86551 s
    Code block 'Run fireducks query 7' took: 28.03717 s
    Code block 'Run fireducks query 8' took: 52.17197 s
    Code block 'Run fireducks query 9' took: 58.59863 s
    terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::length_error'
      what():  vector::_M_default_append
    Code block 'Overall execution of ALL fireducks queries' took: 249.06256 s
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/home/ritchie46/miniconda3/lib/python3.10/runpy.py", line 196, in _run_module_as_main
        return _run_code(code, main_globals, None,
      File "/home/ritchie46/miniconda3/lib/python3.10/runpy.py", line 86, in _run_code
        exec(code, run_globals)
      File "/home/ritchie46/Downloads/deleteme/polars-tpch/queries/fireducks/__main__.py", line 39, in <module>
        execute_all("fireducks")
      File "/home/ritchie46/Downloads/deleteme/polars-tpch/queries/fireducks/__main__.py", line 22, in execute_all
        run(
      File "/home/ritchie46/miniconda3/lib/python3.10/subprocess.py", line 526, in run
        raise CalledProcessError(retcode, process.args,
    subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['/home/ritchie46/Downloads/deleteme/polars-tpch/.venv/bin/python', '-m', 'fireducks.imhook', 'queries/fireducks/q10.py']' died with <Signals.SIGABRT: 6>.
    make: \*\* [Makefile:52: run-fireducks] Error 1
    (.venv) [fireducks]  ritchie46 /home/ritchie46/Downloads/deleteme/polars-tpch[2] $

If it's good, then why not just fork it when (if) the license changes? It is 3-clause BSD.

In fact, what's stopping the pandas library from incorporating fireducks code into the mainline branch? pandas itself is BSD.

There is no code. The binary blob is licensed.