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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

#131

Post by kevincox »

rakoo wrote: post #86
blendergeek wrote: post #38

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.

They have to be shared to the user under the same license. So any user could publish the changes publicly.

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

#132

Post by jpalomaki »

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…

How does this actually work towards your employees or 3rd party personnel (for example consultants) getting access to the tools - would you have to make the source code available for them and allow them to distribute the code?

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

#133

Post by sandstrom »

wyoawayd wrote: post #119

There's a lot of weird assumptions in this thread that this is some sort of strike against Amazon/AWS. It's not. AWS's managed grafana is built in partnership with grafana labs, and this license change won't affect it. From Grafana: "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…

It could still be with AWS in mind. After this change, they'll be in a better negotiation position vs. AWS, since AWS can't (as easily) threaten that they'll build their own competing offer.

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

#134

Post by matkoniecz »

api wrote: post #102
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…

Problem: the letters "G, P, L" are toxic to a huge number of companies. This has nothing to do with the controversy around Stallman. It's because Microsoft spent over a billion dollars in the 1990s mis-educating the market that GPL software is "viral" and if present can "infect" non-GPL software with the GPL license. The problem would go away if you renamed the license to something else. It's that stupid. A lot of th…

> Problem: the letters "G, P, L" are toxic to a huge number of companies.

Even if true, why it is problem? Company so misinformed is not going to be helpful anyway.

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

#135

Post by raegis »

jchw wrote: post #97
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.

While many are dismissing your concerns, I do think this is a valid point, at least to some degree. For example, Google institutes a blanket ban on all AGPL code: https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/ Now, one can read into why exactly this may be, though I have a strong feeling it is simply due to the fact that enforcing correct use of the license is harder than usual. Even if you use it alongside only c…

I suspect this is not a popular opinion, but Google's AGPL policy reads like FUD to me. From the first paragraph:

"...extremely difficult for Google to comply with..."

and

"...presents a huge risk to Google..."

and later in the document is the best part:

"This viral effect requires that the complete corresponding source code...".

All from a company which built itself on GPL software. This reminds me of Steve Ballmer ranting about Linux being a virus 20 years ago.

More:

"Do not install AGPL-licensed programs on your workstation, Google-issued laptop, or Google-issued phone without explicit authorization from the Open Source Programs Office."

Assuming Google follows its own policy, this just creates a hassle for its employees. Worse, Google making this public sends a strong anti-AGPL message to other companies. I'd bet $10 RStudio server (AGPL) is installed somewhere at Google (perhaps the commercial version). But other organizations with less sophisticated legal departments might just ban RStudio completely following Google's lead. I would not call Google irresponsible here, but I think it could act more responsibly.

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

#136

Post by indigochill »

api wrote: post #104
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…

Anything not hard-copyleft (GPL, AGPL) or source-available (BSL etc.) is going to be embraced, extended, and SaaSified / paywalled. Eventually the open version might get abandoned since its authors will get tired of providing free labor to billion dollar cloud companies. I don't think you'll see a lot of major projects under super-liberal licenses in the future. You will see such licenses for libraries and other comp…

> I don't think you'll see a lot of major projects under super-liberal licenses in the future. You will see such licenses for libraries and other components.

And that seems fine, at least if you subscribe to the Unix philosophy of composability. Honestly, I love Django, but for some projects I'd love even more to use just Django's ORM without all the other stuff (which I also like, but is irrelevant for some projects).

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

#137

Post by josephcsible »

akulkarni wrote: post #73
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…

(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.

If the Timescale License is less restrictive than AGPL, then why not dual-license your product under the Timescale License and AGPL? Wouldn't that give everyone the best of both worlds?

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

#138

Post by klelatti »

bosswipe wrote: post #115
johannes1234321 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPL is a license qualifying the criteria of OSI's OpenSource definition and FSF's Free Software definition. A key point there is that a user can use the software quite freely without restrictions only with the caveat that modifications have to be made available to users. (AGPL is slighqtly more complex) Many of the "modern" licenses allow to look at code, but prevent distribution and/or modification and/or usage. Th…

I don't value OSI's stamp of approval since they were explicitly founded to coopt FSF's effort and make it more corporate friendly. Obviously corporate lawyers would disagree with me. A license that allows all typical freedoms except "use the software to start a SaaS using proprietary infrastructure" is fine by me.

Proprietary infrastructure = All infrastructure essentially.

So you're fine with a license that can't be used for SaaS. So basically you're happy for the commercial internet to be powered by proprietary software - with all that would mean for free software.

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

#139

Post by supercheetah »

swyx wrote: post #95
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…

> using AGPL is so much better than flavor-of-the-week license license noob here - can you elaborate on why exactly it is so much better?

It closes the server loophole in which companies will use and modify Free software they're using just on their servers, but never make those changes available to clients, which is not restricted by just the regular GPL.

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

#140

Post by sojsurf »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #8
candiddevmike wrote: post #2

I can see why they would relicense Grafana this way, but why Loki? It's a fairly immature product that needs the boost of a less restrictive license IMO. I'm worried this will harm the adoption of it compared to the ES ecosystem (OpenSearch in particular) and we won't see it used for anything beyond Grafana.

Popularity can increase rapidly, and if they do it too late, Amazon will screw them just like they did with Elastic.

Counter opinion:

I don't want to host Elasticsearch myself, which is why I pay Elastic to host several clusters. That said, I really don't want to be locked into a single-vendor situation, which is what Elastic is realistically aiming for. I am 100% glad that Amazon forked ES, because it preserves the benefits of using an open source stack. I still have a choice of hosted providers. In my opinion, the amazon fork is much more likely to lead to a healthy ecosystem of hosted ES providers than the Elasticsearch version.

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