
Questions answered on the change to Lightbend and Lagom for Java - 16bytes
http://www.lightbend.com/blog/questions-answered-on-the-change-to-lightbend-and-lagom-for-java
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16bytes
Background: Typesafe was the primary commercial entity behind the Scala
programming language.

They've recently rebranded to Lightbend:

[http://www.lightbend.com/blog/typesafe-changes-name-to-
light...](http://www.lightbend.com/blog/typesafe-changes-name-to-lightbend)

This announcement has caused some controversy in the Scala community due to
their explicit focus on Java customers, and changing a name that was
semantically linked to Scala itself.

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16bytes
As a Scala proponent, I was worried at first about Typesafe's rebranding. Now,
however, I'm of the opinion that a strong Lightbend company is good for the
Scala community.

That being said, I think Lightbend could have done more to anticipate the
concerns from the Scala community, and--for pete's sake--use less market
speak. A lot of this post reads like it was written by a spin doctor.

> Half of the top-10 Scala contributors are with Lightbend, and the Scala team
> is the largest of any of our engineering teams.

Yes! It took how many words to get to this point?

IMHO, this would be much better received if it contained concrete and
demonstrable backing of Scala. Something like:

At Lightbend we believe actions speak louder than words.

* To demonstrate our commitment to Scala, we are launching a LTS program. Any company purchasing Scala support or commercial licenses from Lightbend will be able to continue to do so for the next X years. If you are a company considering Scala adoption, Lightbend will be your partner for the long-haul.

* In 2016, Lightbend will sponsor these specific Scala conferences, meetups and hackathons...

* Lightbend's Scala team has been a large contributor to Scala. Our goal is to double the amount of the changesets contibuted in 2016.

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user1241320
Overall I think this is actually good news for people like typelevel[1]...
that is people with a strong passion for Scala, a stronger community approach
and a slightly different view than Typesafe/Lightbend.

[1][http://typelevel.org/](http://typelevel.org/)

