Comparing Permissive-Licensed OSS Load Testing Tools — k6 Alternatives and Use-Case Mapping

With k6 sitting on AGPL-3.0, requests to rebuild the load testing stack on permissive licenses only have become a regular conversation. This post lines up the major Apache 2.0 / MIT candidates (Gatling, Locust, JMeter, Goose, Vegeta, oha, Fortio, ghz, and others), comparing protocol coverage, resource efficiency, and CI/CD fit, and maps each to a workload.