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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

#81
post #78
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make with the reverse proxy as it doesn't seem related to anything the parent wrote.

Sure! Saying that the parent’s “develop an proprietary UI and use Loki as backend” is a slippery slope to “user sees data that incorporates data served from Loki” which I am arguing could be interpreted as data that would require the developer to maintain a source repository for Loki under the AGPL.

I see now and yes the AGPL seems vague in that regard.

If it's anything like dynamic linking and GPL that could be considered okay even if it's not the intention of the licensee. Seems like the license should be more explicit about what "interacting with" entails.

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

#82
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…

(Timescale founder) We actually designed the Timescale License to be _less_ restrictive than AGPL. It contains no virality. It just prevents public clouds from offering TimescaleDB-aaS.

I prefer AGPL despite that, mainly because I don’t believe a license that discriminates on use cases in such a direct manner could be compatible with either GPL or DFSG. It’s hard to directly compare virality vs use-case discrimination as far as restrictiveness goes. However, I don’t believe there is a good argument that such licenses can be considered open source.

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

#83
post #44

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…

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 exc…

"What people want" is not what I want.

Market share/mindshare is almost an inverse measure of quality at this point!

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

#84
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?

It seems like this one sentence of my message has become the focal point of it, which was not the intent. However, I corrected it to be more close to the truth, which is to say that it is merely controversial, not necessarily that its status as an open source license is debatable.

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

#85
post #31
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…

> I think that's misunderstanding of AGPL.

That's GPs point.

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

#86

I applaud this decision. I would like to see all major SaaSS projects be AGPLv3. End users still have freedom to user, modify, and distribute the software. Cloud providers must share contributions. This is how I like it.

> Cloud providers must share contributions

To be really strict: AGPL only mandates that contributions be shared with the user. The freedom of users is more important than the freedom of developers.

Of course an upstream maintainer can be a user and get the contributions.

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

#87
post #61
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is a misunderstanding of how vague the AGPL actually is. The key clause is "your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version." Would putting AGPL software behind a reverse proxy change the fact that you're a user interacting with it r…

And 99.99% of users don't modify the code so it's irrelevant.

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

#88
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I don't get why Amazon should be scared by AGPL. I mean all of their services run on GPLed Linux, why should they be scared by a GPLed Grafana?Even if they had to open-source their Grafana contributions, they could do this in a way that they are worthless for potential competitors (e.g. if the contribution depends on a proprietary Amazon system)

> they could do this in a way that they are worthless for potential competitors (e.g. if the contribution depends on a proprietary Amazon system)

That is not allowed.

"""The "Corresponding Source" for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work."""

(Emphasis on that last part mine.)

"""Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software."""

If Amazon modifies Grafana so it depends on a proprietary Amazon system, the source code for that system is included in the Corresponding Source, and if they allow users to interact with that modified version, they need to provide them with access to the proprietary system's source code.

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

#89
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.

While it is true that Grafana's new license is still FOSS not every company, public cloud provider is willing to accept the AGPLv3 license[1]. Hence a fork with the old license is not unlikely.

[1] https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/

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

#90
post #60
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.

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 licens…

The previous license was Apache 2.0, not GPLv3
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