Akka’s Story Is The Perfect Example Of Everything That’s Wrong With Classic Open Source

Hang on, let me find my “I told you so” banner…

By the end of this article, some will be convinced I must hate open source. To them, I say, it’s your prerogative to misunderstand. Everyone else will likely sit back, raise an eyebrow, perhaps two, and ponder for a minute before posting their views on the matter in the comments section. Many others will go and sleep on it, perhaps even forget about ever reading this. Regardless of which group you’re in, without being overly alarmist, I think the future is going to happen anyway, and in that future open source is going to look very different.

The problem with modern open-source is that it’s stuck in the 70s.

I was a kid in the 90s when Linux made its first appearance in 1991, roughly two decades after the concept of open source was born in the early 70s. That’s when my dad was a kid. He didn’t care about computers, but I do, so I do it retroactively for him too. In terms of tech, all he cares about is his iPad. Beyond that and YouTube, for all he cares, everything can go to hell — even open source. But I am not my dad and regardless of how much an Apple-head I might look, open-source software was often part of my daily life, and still is. As I moved to software engineering that became even more true, and if one day I’d have to give up macOS, Ubuntu would be my first choice.

Like most software engineers, I have a soft spot for OSS, but I am fairly convinced it cannot survive governed by the same rules as in the 90s.

It’s a brave new world…

It really is. Look at us running JavaScript on the server, building stuff with web assembly in the browser and generating nightmarish images with AI in the cloud. We have never built so much software as we are today, and tomorrow we’ll build even more. Just React alone is getting downloaded nearly 16 million times every week! That number is on the rise. Moment.js is being downloaded over 18 million times a week, and downloads are also on the rise. It’s actively being used by 3.3 million projects, but it only has 593 contributors. React is actively used by 11.4 million projects and has only 1574 contributors on GitHub. Material UI, an incredibly popular UI library with 3.2 million weekly downloads and 2400 contributors, has only a few backers. If it’s not clear where I’m going with these numbers, let me spell it out for ya…

We’re all mooching free stuff to build multi-billion dollar businesses.

Some software owners are, however, waking up. There was Docker Desktop, now there’s Akka, and probably several others over the last couple of years that I am not aware of. But it’s happening. Owners of tools integral to software development are waking up to a new reality, where software isn’t meant to be a free resource. It’s a world that’s challenging the viability of OSS, and rightly so.

Digital !== free

Imagine building a mansion. Not just a house, a proper mansion, with at least two wings, a couple of floors, even a staff’s quarter, surrounded by a lavish park with its own lake. Imagine only paying for the labour putting it all together, and nothing else. Construction materials for free, tools for free, machinery for free, everything from wiring, and plumbing to decorating and landscaping for free. Now wouldn’t that be nice. Your 100 million dollar mansion done for the cost of just 2 million! Hell yeah! Where do I sign?!?

Well, if that sounds ridiculous, think again because that’s precisely what we’re all doing with software. Look at the package.json of every web app, or the pub spec.yaml file of every Flutter project, and the long list of dependencies you see is mostly free software and tools. The amount of work that went into all those packages and tools is astronomical.

If every software engineer who ever contributed to OSS would retroactively ask to get paid for their time, the global economy would break down, and we’d see a recession like never before.

Yet, we all assume at the start of every single app we build — especially on the web — that we can do so by relying on free stuff, essentially the selflessness and goodwill of a few tens of thousands of software engineers, which if you think of it for more than a minute, does sound quite wrong and unfair doesn’t it?

Akka’s decision to move to a paid licensing model sent shockwaves through the industry. Many are up in arms and ready to drop it, or find ways around the new model, instead of thanking everyone involved in the development of Akka for all the free years they got out of an incredibly useful piece of software. It was a very brave announcement from Lightbend, and it’s a signal to the industry that it’s just the beginning of a new — and frankly, inevitable — trend, where free software for for-profit use is no more.

Open source must evolve to a new model

I know, “must” is a strong word, but I genuinely don’t see OSS surviving in its current form, and while it’s out of the blue for many, Akka’s move is — for one — not surprising, and secondly, pretty fair. The classic 1000 people build something great and 50 million profit off it, is not sustainable. As much as I’d like it to be, it just isn’t. Looking again at Material UI’s sponsors, none of the tech giants using it are on that list.

I get no satisfaction from having a package of mine downloaded 1 million times. It won’t pay for my retirement or my cancer treatment at the age of 60.

Perhaps that sounds cold and materialistic, but we don’t live in a hippie world where we can kumbaya ourselves back to health and financial security. A new OSS framework must be created, where certain thresholds dictate the responsibilities the software consumer has. While this is in no way an official recommendation, I’d imagine something like this:

• individuals and organisations with no profit: free use,
• individuals and organisations with less than 20K profit: free use,
• individuals and organisations with more than 20K but less than 100K profit: direct contribution or yearly sponsor fee,
• individuals and organisations with over 100K profit: yearly sponsor fee,
• individuals and organisations with over 1M profit: higher tier yearly sponsor fee.

All those funds would then have to be pooled into a common fund that paid contributors for their time. We need to stop conflating OSS with free. If you’re a developer, and you think you can improve a software with a PR and you spend an hour writing and testing that code, you should get remunerated for that. Perhaps it’s less than what an hour of your time is valued at normally, but one should see some returns.

Socialist systems don’t really work unless everyone contributes one way or another and everyone gets something out of it.

This model would also help resolve the hundreds and thousands of bugs out there that every open-source codebase is littered with. Everyone complains about them, but barely anyone wants to spend the time or money to see them fixed. That alone is a strong indicator that the current model is failing.

As much as OSS creators would like to support a piece of software, as it grows in size and popularity, it becomes increasingly difficult, and I ask myself, if we at one point as a society decided that musicians had the right to be paid for every online stream, when did we decide that the same isn’t true for software? Developers have to come up with increasingly creative ways to fund their projects.

Look at FontAwesome. It’s awesome, but they jumped through some serious hoops to keep parts of the software free for everyone. And that to me doesn’t sound right. Firstly because the onus shouldn’t be on the developers to seek creative ways of funding, secondly because in extreme cases they can just do and will do what Akka did, and send unexpected shockwaves through the industry. As a business owner, you want to know certain things upfront and not have to expect that half the tech you rely on changes to a paid model overnight.

A new, industry-wide support model for OSS would ensure both sides of the conversation have a predictable outcome and walk away with something.

I really don’t see any other viable direction. Do you? 💬

Hi there! 👋

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Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility!