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

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