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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

#51

Post by mrwnmonm »

black_puppydog wrote: post #28
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. Git hub 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…

Thanks

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

#52

Post by iFire »

blendergeek wrote: post #46
iFire wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Exactly. This is my understanding.

Edited: Or pick a fork and live on it forever.

Edited: Or write my own Grafana

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

#53

Post by bostik »

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…

Your choice of counterexamples highlights an important aspect. Three of the four are in fact outliers: Kubernetes and Android are both financially backed by Google. Android as a strategic advantage across a global market, Kubernetes as a plumbing layer enabling more businesses operate logically like Google. Sure, it's a CNCF product since 2016 or so, but it still enjoys Google's backing.

Postgres? They have a very specific governance model - a single company can not employ over 50% of the core contributors, to guarantee that the direction of the product is not taken over even by accident.

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

#54

Post by jabiko »

bboreham wrote: post #39
jabiko wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have no Idea. Realistically its probably not the license cost but the one time and the perpetual operational overhead associated with the license that's going to be the problem.

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

#55

Post by nine_k »

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…

To be fair, Free Software was never a business model. It was a licensing model that forced to cooperate even such users who have incentives to grab the code, amend it, and disseminate the closed-source altered version. Free Software is about freedom to know exactly what you are running, and to share it. This us the value it tries to capture.

Various business models can be built around it. A license that restricts closed-source cloud use, like AGPL, still preserves the openness at least. It can be combined with a dual commercial license.

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

#57

Post by wmf »

bostik wrote: post #53
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your choice of counterexamples highlights an important aspect. Three of the four are in fact outliers: Kubernetes and Android are both financially backed by Google. Android as a strategic advantage across a global market, Kubernetes as a plumbing layer enabling more businesses operate logically like Google. Sure, it's a CNCF product since 2016 or so, but it still enjoys Google's backing. Postgres? They have a very sp…

Governance won't help if you have no contributors at all because there's no revenue coming in.

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

#58

Post by tamalsaha001 »

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…

That does not seem to be the case. From [1]

The difference between the AGPL and traditional GPL is simple: The AGPL seeks to close a "loophole" that allows a company or organization to modify GPL'ed software and use it to provide a service — but without actually distributing changes. So a company can take a package like, say, WordPress and modify the software significantly to sell a service — but hold back changes because it's not technically "distributing" or "propagating" the software. The AGPL goes a bit further and says that if the program is "intended to interact with users through a computer network" and if the version that you received gives users "the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program's complete source code," you have to maintain that functionality and distribute the modified version.

[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2229265/is-the-affero-g...

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

#60

Post by devmor »

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.

If you are not offering a product built on top of Grafana as a network-available service, then there is no difference between the new license and the previous GPL3 license for you whatsoever.

If you are, then your obligation would change to specifically making only that work which builds on top of the Grafana code available to others for free, along with the AGPL3-licensed Grafana code. You are not required to license that code that you wrote in any way, with the caveat that others may freely use it.

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