Akka and the future of SpaceBeans

Posted Tue 04 Oct, 2022.

About one month ago Lightbend announced that they are changing the licence of Akka:

Why We Are Changing the License for Akka

I have waited a bit to mention this because there has been drama and confusing information, and now that things have settled, a good TL;DR could be:

> Akka is not open source any more, and the latest OSS version is 2.6.19.

Apparently a paid licence will only be necessary for large companies (not sure if profiting from Akka), and looks like security patches will be backported (at least for a while). Any non-OSS version will be released as OSS after 3 years, but that doesn't matter in my opinion.

SpaceBeans is currently using the latest OSS version of Akka (the service relies on Akka Streams), and I don't plan to use the non-OSS version, so this is the end of the road for SpaceBeans as it is today.

I started the project for fun, because I liked the Gemini idea, and it was an good project to try new technologies. When I started to work on it, it was a weird time to use fs2 (a competing stream library) because one of its main components was transitioning version with breaking changes, so I went with Akka Streams instead. I don't fully regret my decision (technically speaking, Akka was interesting, and I learned a lot), but in hindsight, it wasn't the best.

The code is not too complicated and it should be possible to rewrite the streams part to use fs2, but I will need time and energy to do that. I don't really know if anyone else, besides myself, is using SpaceBeans at all. There are a lot of good Gemini servers out there, so if I was to deprecate and sunset SpaceBeans, I don't think it would be terrible.

But if you use SpaceBeans, because for whatever reason a performant server running on the JVM is your thing, and you would like to keep using it in a "next-gen" version using fs2, feel free to drop me an email (even if is just to say hi!). I know that the chances any SpaceBeans user is reading this capsule are slim, but hey!

SpaceBean's first release was in February of 2021.

SpaceBeans Gemini server

This capsule is currently served by SpaceBeans.

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