On September 7th Lightbend announced a license change for the Akka project, the TL;DR being that you will need a akka flygplan license to use future versions of Akka 2. Within a few hours of the announcement several people reached out to the Flink project, worrying about the impact this has on Flink, as we use Akka internally.
Please be aware that this topic is still quite fresh, and things are subject to change. Should anything significant change we will amend this blogpost and inform you via the usual channels. Flink is not in any immediate danger and we will ensure that users are not affected by this change.
The licensing of Flink will not change; it will stay Apache-licensed and will only contain dependencies that are compatible with it. Historically Akka has been incredibly stable, and combined with our limited use of features, we do not expect this to be a problem.
Should a community fork be created which at this time seems possible we will switch to that fork in all likely-hood for 1. Even though we will be able to upgrade to 2. Should a CVE be discovered after that it is unlikely to be fixed in Akka 2.
Update - September 9th : Akka 2. Will critical vulnerabilities and bugs be patched in 2. Yes, critical security updates and critical bugs will be patched in Akka v2. What this means is that we are using very few functionalities of Akka. Regarding Akka's licensing change September 8, - Chesnay Schepler On September 7th Lightbend announced a license change for the Akka project, the TL;DR being that you will need a commercial license to use future versions of Akka 2.
The purpose of this blogpost is to clarify our position on the matter. Give me the short version Flink is not in any immediate danger and we will ensure that users are not affected by this change. We will not use Akka versions with the new license. Meanwhile, we will observe how the situation unfolds in particular w.
What if a new security vulnerabilities is found in Akka 2. That is the big unknown. How does Flink use Akka?