Questions answered on the change to Lightbend and Lagom for Java

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...

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.

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.

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/