I fairly recently dodge a bullet; I rewrote a large chunk of code I was working on using Akka because my idea lent itself fairly well to an actor system. I got it working fine with Akka on my local machine, I was about to make a PR for it at work, and then saw that it was using BUSL instead of Apache, which I had assumed it was using (since a lot of stuff in the Java world seems to use Apache).

I did get my stuff working with Pekko (the Apache fork of Akka), and it did work, but I was so pissed off at the entirety of this that I ended up rewriting the entire thing again using Vert.x, which I double checked the license for before doing more work.

I do understand why Akka feels like they have to use something like BUSL, it's hard to make money as a smaller software company, doubly so for open source software, and I also realize me complaining that "this free product made with free labor isn't free enough for me" is pretty entitled, but fundamentally I really don't think that the BUSL (and its similar licenses) are the right way forward. Whether or not it's fair, stuff like Akka does have competition from stuff that has more OSS-friendly stuff, and fundamentally I'm just going to use those, and if they're not up to snuff I'll augment them myself.