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Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

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

#31

Post by 188201 »

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.

I think that's misunderstanding of AGPL. For internal use, AGPL does not require to share the proprietary part.

If a company develop an proprietary UI and use Loki as backend, this is not serving Loki directly to customer, so that does not require company to release their code.

It is similar to GPL. Dynamic linking to a GPL software does not require the developer releasing their code.

Only provider serving Loki instance directly to customer required to share the code.

Only Amazon is upset that they cannot just host a popular open source project directly on their cloud. Maybe they could pay a license fee for dual licensing arrangement, which is a better way to support open source startup.

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

#32

Post by gnalck »

Those who have reservations about the terms of AGPLv3 - would any of you prefer if it was licensed under BUSL1.1 (i.e., source-available or eventually-open-source) instead? I'm curious to see the perspectives of businesses as to whether AGPLv3 or BUSL-1.1 is a "bigger risk" when compared to the previous Apache 2.0 license.

My gut feeling is that those passionate about open source on the whole will tend to prefer AGPLv3, while businesses or those making decisions on the behalf of a business, may prefer BUSL-1.1. I think there are trade offs with either approach.

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

#33

Post by jabiko »

bboreham wrote: post #17
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.

Would you consider paying for a licence to use it?

Honestly, I have no idea.

I think if there would be a possibility to pay money to have what we are doing reviewed by Grafana and be "certified" to be withing what they consider acceptable under the AGPL that might actually be a good option

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

#34

Post by justincormack »

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…

"AWS is a strategic partner, and given the commercial relationship AWS has with us for AMG, AWS and their AMG customers are not impacted by this change. We hope that other XaaS providers follow AWS’s lead in working with open source software companies in similarly sustainable ways." https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relic...

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

#35

Post by [deleted] »

josephcsible wrote: post #21
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.

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by josephcsible »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #13

Okay, so they go out of their way to avoid answering how this actually affects people, so I'll ask here: If a company uses grafana internally, this should have no effect, right? And then the next step: If a company did offer grafana-based dashboards to customers but wasn't actually modifying grafana, what if anything does this do?

They'd have to offer the source code to Grafana itself, which has basically negligible effect since it doesn't have anything of theirs in it.

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

#37

Post by klintcho »

188201 wrote: post #31
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.

I think that's misunderstanding of AGPL. For internal use, AGPL does not require to share the proprietary part. If a company develop an proprietary UI and use Loki as backend, this is not serving Loki directly to customer, so that does not require company to release their code. It is similar to GPL. Dynamic linking to a GPL software does not require the developer releasing their code. Only provider serving Loki insta…

This might be the case. However there is an additional risk and process component:

- you might not want to risk because you don't have lawyers etc in your company.

- even if you have lawyers etc in your company, if there are 2 alternatives one which is just an MIT license, you'll probably go for that one because you don't want to have a 1.5 month review of the use of this AGPL licensed alternative.

In general things like this https://github.com/xdspacelab/openvslam/wiki/Termination-of-... (repo with 3k stars), an effort terminated because of some traces of GPL code MIGHT be somewhere in there comes to light. Even though Grafana etc are mostly tools, for my startup I would probably not risk any of this (for my own sake and also for any kind of due diligence in case it ever gets acquired)

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

#39

Post by bboreham »

jabiko wrote: post #33
bboreham wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider paying for a licence to use it?

Honestly, I have no idea. I think if there would be a possibility to pay money to have what we are doing reviewed by Grafana and be "certified" to be withing what they consider acceptable under the AGPL that might actually be a good option

What about just paying for a commercial licence to use it to meet your needs?

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

#40

Post by josephcsible »

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…

How is it debated whether AGPL is open source? Who says it isn't?
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