Thank you! AGPL is a fine license for software freedom.
Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
141–150 of 578 posts
Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
#142All 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 the core companies maintaining them did not do this they would eventually die
Good riddance. Incumbents owned by corporations have too much control and prevent replacement projects from arising. When a community builds a solution, how it works is dictated by its users and developers, not profits.
Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
#143I wonder how long will it take for Amazon to announce their an open source fork.
Unlike ElasticSearch, Grafana itself is still open-source. Forking Grafana would be viewed a lot less favorably than forking ElasticSearch was.
Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
Google has the same OSS philosophy as Microsoft and the rest of the software community needs to pressure Google to change its stance on the AGPL.
Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cannot be helped - that's just fear of the unknown. If legal is familiar with AGPL, like they are with GPL, BSD or Apache, they should see no issue. This change does not really affect anyone except for the very small number of people/companies that make their own changes to software and make this software available online to others. If you aren't such a company and legal would still say you guys can't use e.g. Grafan…
Many devs at Google routinely use GPLv3 code, in GNU Emacs, to make an example. Unless you’re repackaging Grafana into an app bundle for customers to use, there’s no violation occurring here, right?
GPL and AGPL are very different here.
If a developer uses GPL Emacs to write a server that uses GPL libraries and Google runs that sever in their datacenter it is very clear that Google doesn't have to release any source code.
However Google's argument is that if they make a web application that uses AGPL MongoDB as a backend it is unclear if 1. The user is interacting with MongoDB over a network and 2. do they need to release the code of their server.
It appears that the answers are 1. Yes and 2. No but apparently Google isn't confident to use that in court. (Or at least they don't see enough benefits for that risk)
Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes zero business sense. Your first post is about the one time and perpetual operational overhead associated with operating under the prior FOSS license (yes, you’re saying it’s the new license that’s a problem, but since the situation arose while operating under the prior conditions then implicitly those conditions carried this very overhead). Operating under any license carried an overhead, unless you simply…
> Your first post is about the one time and perpetual operational overhead associated with operating under the prior FOSS license My first post is about the fact that even though the planned use case would be 100% compliant to the AGPLv3 license the fear that is associated with that license could prevent such use. > That makes zero business sense Purchasing a license in that case while not strictly necessary might be…
> In the end though I highly doubt that's whats going to happen. The most likely outcome is that we just get told to get rid of Grafana and use something else.
Whatever you replace it with will have the same licensing overhead. Again, this makes no sense.
If you said we can’t afford to pay for it, fine. But you explicitly said you don’t think cost is an issue.
Maybe I’m making the wrong inference, but it sounds like you’re afraid your higher ups just don’t want to have any restrictions placed on whatever business need it is that Grafana is filling for you. If I haven’t misunderstood that fear, then I regret to say that any software product other than one you build and maintain yourselves will come with some restrictions or the possibility of future restrictions.
When I say this makes no business sense, that’s what I’m trying to get at: other than (potentially) licensing cost, any Grafana substitute will come with the same issues, plus switching costs. So unless there is a FOSS product that provides a better solution to your problem, by definition switching will be more costly than maintaining status quo.
Or am I missing the point?
Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
#147I 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.
I have a question regarding AGPL, that I couldn't answer by Googling or reading the license.
Let's say that Postgres server is licensed under AGPL, and I modify it to my needs. I have a closed source web application, that is publicly accessible, and uses Postgres for storing data.
a) Do I need to publish source code of my version of Postgres?
b) Does my application (which relies on Postgres, and my patches) need to also be under AGPL, and be available in source code form to all my users/visitors?
Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
#148All 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…
And each one of them will be forked by the major companies that were supposed to pay.
Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
#149Earlier 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…
GPL is "toxic" to the companies I work at because using GPL-licensed code would force them to disclose the source of their proprietary software.
There's not much else to it.
Re: Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
#150I 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.
I mean, good for them? If they're "just rebranding and selling access for infinite markup" then surely the only people who would pay them are either too lazy or too busy to host it themselves, or too rich to care?
Would you prefer that people/companies that fall into these categories be forced to go through some _other_ reseller (who is just adding their own markup on top of the cloud hosting costs) instead of getting the service directly from their cloud provider of choice?