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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

#41

Post by justincormack »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #29
_d7dt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Plugins don't seem to have been relicensed looking at https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/HEAD/LICENSING.md

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

#42

Post by echelon »

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…

If they don't, Amazon will gobble them up.

This is a good thing.

Linux being GPL 2 was great for computing when we had thick clients, but now everything is moving to the cloud. Companies can innovate on top of it and not really give back.

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

#43

Post by aloisdg »

iFire wrote: post #26
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.

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.

Yes you can. The purpose of (A)GPLv3 is that someone else cannot benefit from you work if you cant benefit from theirs. It is a matter of leveraging cooperation.

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

#44

Post by nine_k »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #24
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 d…

Postgres looks like the only interesting entry here.

K8s and Android have a major corporation backing them, which extracts value from them in its internal operation anyway. They are such products that using them by competition commoditizes said competition. Android on like 95% of phones outside China has very important proprietary parts, making it hardly compatible with a bunch of top-tier apps.

BSD OSes don't do excessively well, with regard to market share and mind share. They are reasonably healthy though.

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

#46

Post by blendergeek »

iFire wrote: post #26
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.

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.

It depends on what you mean by "combine". If you are releasing a Linux distro that has as one piece of software Grafana, you'll be fine.

If your software is in effect an extension of Grafana, you will need to release source code under AGPLv3.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation

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

#47

Post by ltbarcly3 »

I remember when the AGPL was being talked about in around 2008 or so, and thinking it was ludicrous. Now I wonder if it's too lenient. AWS is just rebranding open source products and selling access for infinite markups while killing the open economy that created them.

Maybe what we need is a 'no AWS' license, think Apache License but with a clause that says no corporation with more than $50B in revenue can resell it.

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

#48

Post by frenchman99 »

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 do say it:

> It’s important to note that this change does not prevent our users from using, modifying, or providing our open source software to others — provided, however, that under the AGPL license, users have to share source code if they are modifying it and making it available to others (either as a distribution or over a network). For distributors, AGPL has the same source code sharing requirements as GPL. Those conditions are designed to encourage third parties looking to modify the software to also contribute back to the project and the community.

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

#49

Post by devmor »

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 debatable whether AGPL is open source? Who is debating this? AGPL is so open source that it legally forces open source if you try to close it.

Anyone debating that it's not has a screw loose.

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

#50

Post by rustc »

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…

Mongo and ElasticSearch are completely different though. Related to those licenses: Has there been any clarification of what exactly you need to release for free if you use them to offer a SaaS?

> If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License.

> “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

Source: https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license

I can think of a hundred questions based on that text. If I use S3 to store data for my Mongo SaaS, do I need to call Bezos and buy the complete source code of S3?

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