Lightbend Inc., the creator of the popular application development platform Akka, said today it’s changing the software’s licensing model to ensure that its biggest users contribute more toward its development.

Akka is a developer toolkit designed to streamline the process of building and running heavy-duty distributed apps. Akka is ideal for individuals and companies that want to build programs in Scala and Java that can scale up quickly while avoiding many of the issues associated with concurrent systems.

One of the key benefits of Akka is that it enables developers to build highly scalable systems that can expand or contract based on workload. It allows for a much more efficient and cost-effective use of resources, especially for organizations that rely on highly distributed systems.

Akka overcomes many of the challenges inherent in traditional object-oriented programming, especially with regard to the large, concurrent networks required to deal with such resource-intensive and variable workloads. Akka notably eliminates the need for mechanisms such as synchronization locks and semaphores, which are required to mitigate problems associated with the use of shared memory.

Lightbend said today that Akka, along with its sister offering Akka Serverless, has been widely adopted by industry leaders in the financial services, e-commerce, automotive, web services, cloud infrastructure and internet gaming markets. However, it reckons there’s a problem with its existing “open core” business model.

The problem, Lightbend says, is that once an open-source project becomes critical to an organization’s daily operations, those companies opt to self-support the software without contributing anything more to its development or the wider community. That happens despite the fact that those organizations generate substantial profits using what is essentially free technology.

To put a stop to this, Lightbend said it’s changing Akka’s license from Apache 2.0 to the Business Source License v1.1, starting with the Akka v.27 version that will be delivered in October.

Under this new model, every organization that uses Akka will be required to obtain a commercial license. Those with less than $25 million in annual revenue will not be required to pay. However, those with more than $25 million in annual revenue will be required to pay for the license and also a subscription that’s required for production usage of the Akka software. The license does not permit backporting of any software released under the new license.

Lightbend founder and Chief Executive Jonas Bonér justified the move, saying the intention is to ensure shared responsibility for all parties that rely on Akka, in order to contribute to its future development. “This will enable Akka to remain at the forefront of building innovative solutions that are used by many globally recognized brands to build and run some of their most critical applications,” he explained.

The BSL v1.1 license is not open-source. First created by MariaDB Corp., it works in two stages. The first stage is commercial, where the software is viewable, downloadable and usable for free in nonproduction environments, with production usage requiring a license from Lightbend. Then, after three years, the source code for that version will be released under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it becomes open source.

Image: Lightbend