Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3 • Hacker News Board

Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

#21

Post by josephcsible » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #5

"Amazon Announces Grafana Fork , Promises Amazing Things for the Community" (2021/05/08) [1] On a more serious note: there is a bit of a trend in the licensing world. Mongo or ElasticSearch changes, or cool new projects like redpanda [2] launching with BSL. Open source is still a very young business model. One that has provided a tremendous amount of value over the past decades, but we still need to figure out how to…

Amazon forking ElasticSearch to keep its old license is a good thing, since ElasticSearch's new license is a proprietary visible-source license. Grafana's new license is still FOSS, so it's really not a fair comparison.

Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

#22

Post by jononor » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

jononor wrote: post #10

Hmm. Where does Grafana people stand on what constitutes a "derivative" work? Are my Grafana dashboards derivatives of Grafana, and must now be published? If I embed a Grafana dashboard in my application, is my application now a derivative of Grafana and must be released as AGPLv3?

The Q&A suggests that "unmodified" distributions are not an issue. But if I distribute dashboards, custom configurations, etc - is that a "modification" ?

Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

#23

Post by Shoop » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

mrwnmonm wrote: post #15

Sorry for my ignorance, what does this license mean? I find licenses a little bit difficult to understand.

"The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html

Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

#24

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

asim wrote: post #3

All of the most important software of our lifetime is going through this relicensing effort as the creators attempt to capture the value of what it enables. This is not some nefarious plan to screw over the community. It's a very measured and thoughtful way to ensure the long term progress and continuity of these projects. If the core companies maintaining them did not do this they would eventually die and these proj…

> Hopefully over time rather than having everyone choose their own licenses we end up with some form of standardisation.

Yes; if you're going to do this, then using AGPL is so much better than flavor-of-the-week license.

> If the core companies maintaining them did not do this they would eventually die and these projects would slowly rot.

It sounds like you're suggesting that anything but hard-copyleft is doomed to die out, which is a somewhat hard argument to make in a world with lots of counterexamples (postgres, the assorted BSD OSs, kubernetes, Android).

Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

#25

Post by jchw » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

globular-toast wrote: post #12

jchw wrote: post #7

I don't want to weigh in here with a huge value judgement on whether this is the right decision. However, I do want to say that what they're saying regarding SSPL vs AGPL is totally right. One of the biggest sticking points with SSPL is that it's not even really plausibly open source, and it tries to create restrictions that implicate software that is not even "linked" with the program that is licensed under it, whic…

Who I earth would argue that AGPL isn't open source? The kind of people who think open source = free lunch I suppose. It's probably the most open source licence there is.

Maybe it isn't so controversial that it is called 'open source' as it is simply controversial. Though GPLv3 + AGPLv3 improves one of the worse problems, which is compatibility with GPL-licensed code.

edit: And FWIW, I have dropped this claim from the post with a note, especially since it was not my point anyways.

Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

#26

Post by iFire » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

iFire wrote: post #14

josephcsible wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a specific conflict like ZFS-on-Linux that you want to avoid, or are you just asking "how can I most benefit from other people's work without letting anyone else benefit from mine?"

Exactly. This is the ZFS-on-Linux situation. I prefer to keep all my code as much as possible mit and I share them on Github. This is my mode of operation. Grafana makes me unable to use MIT for that use.

The AGPL3 license means that all my MIT code I distribute in a package will be considered AGPL3. So I can't combine Grafana, and my original work and improve both.

This is a stated purpose of GPL3 / AGPL3. I am happy to be told I am wrong and it is possible.

Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

#27

Post by dvfjsdhgfv » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

jabiko wrote: post #9

Even though we use Grafana only internally and there would be no problem with AGPLv3 in theory I see big meetings with legal coming up which might result in us not being able to use it anymore. I could image that its the same with other corporations. In the end that might hurt the popularity of Grafana quite a lot.

In a large number of cases, this is not an issue at all. Just like we all use GPL-ed kernel and a ton of other stuff. There is also no problem with making AGPL-based services available to customers. The caveat is that when you modify AGPL-based code, you need to make the source of these modifications available, too. For some reason, this scares Amazon a lot. Developers know that and use AGPL when they don't want to be screwed by AWS.

Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

#28

Post by black_puppydog » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

mrwnmonm wrote: post #15

Sorry for my ignorance, what does this license mean? I find licenses a little bit difficult to understand.

IANAL, and this is very simplified.

The GPL (without A) requires you to publish sources under compatible license (usually also GPL) if you use a software and distribute it (to clients for example).

Git is GPL. Github however can totally run modified versions of git on their servers to build their service, and doesn't necessarily have to contribute back, since they never distribute their programs to the customer, but only some html.

The AGPL goes one step further and requires any changes that github makes in that situation to also be licensed under AGPL. That way it is like GPL, but for software that is typically run on servers, not on client hardware.

Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

#29

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

_d7dt wrote: post #18

iFire wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. This is the ZFS-on-Linux situation. I prefer to keep all my code as much as possible mit and I share them on Github. This is my mode of operation. Grafana makes me unable to use MIT for that use.

>keep all my code Huh? Grafana isn't your code, it's someone else's code that you'd be using. Unless I misinterpreted, and you are a Grafana contributor. If you are, you could dual license your contributions under AGPL and MIT, if you wanted.

Without knowing what they work on, one obvious case is code that interacts with grafana; extensions, plugins, whatever. For that matter, it's perfectly possible to maintain your own personal patchsets without being a "contributor" per se. Niche, but plausible.

Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

#30

Post by josephcsible » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

iFire wrote: post #14

josephcsible wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a specific conflict like ZFS-on-Linux that you want to avoid, or are you just asking "how can I most benefit from other people's work without letting anyone else benefit from mine?"

Exactly. This is the ZFS-on-Linux situation. I prefer to keep all my code as much as possible mit and I share them on Github. This is my mode of operation. Grafana makes me unable to use MIT for that use.

What is your code? A fork of Grafana? Plugins for it? Or something else?