Will Flink be affected by akka license change ? I hope that Flink license stays the same

No worries, Flink is part of the Apache Software Foundation. Thus, the license cannot change as no company but an open source foundation is behind it.

And what about akka ? Or is it early to discuss it?

We don't really know yet. Worse case we stick to a version that still uses the Apache License for a while and then re-evaluate alternatives.

I’m just wondering, what are the alternatives ?

Of course the Flink community has to deal with this issue at some point, as we are also users of Akka. But this is internal to the community and needs to be discussed on the dev@ mailling list. Old versions will keep the old license, there is currently no need to upgrade Flink's akka version. Luckily Akka is not in the hot path but only in the coordination layer.

what are the alternatives

For example, some third party might just create an Akka fork without the license change. For us this would be the easiest solution (and the one we have the least control over 🙈 ). We could also look into alternative libraries. But as Timo pointed out, there isn't any urgency at this time.

that’s the watercooler talk at our office today, who will fork Akka. (it’s probably only question of time). Same that happened with ElasticSearch.

Or may time to re-write the coordination layer with Netty and say good riddance 🙈

That's one alternative, yes.