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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

#151

Post by topaz0 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #93
atat7024 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What people want" is not what I want. Market share/mindshare is almost an inverse measure of quality at this point!

This is what might be described as the 'hipster' sentiment distilled to its base axiom. Not necessarily knocking it, though!

It's only hipster sentiment if it is on principle ("this is popular -> I don't want it"). It sounds to me like just an observation in this case ("it so happens that the most popular things are the ones I want least"). The "almost" clarifies this.

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

#152

Post by beachy »

nopzor wrote: post #67
jononor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Q&A suggests that "unmodified" distributions are not an issue. But if I distribute dashboards, custom configurations, etc - is that a "modification" ?

nope, that wouldn't be a modification to the AGPL-licensed grafana. you are free to do that. plus, dashboards and configuration are inherently ("source available"), so even if one were to consider them to be modifications (which they're not), you are already distributing them in source form ;-) [note: am co-founder/ceo of grafana labs]

How about an intelligent proxy that effectively intercepted and modified the queries that Grafana send to it's back end?

Is that considered a modification?

In my eyes it shouldn't be as no changes are needed to any Grafana code, it's all just networking.

Interested to get your perspective.

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

#153

Post by vinceguidry »

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.

Too. Effing. Bad. These companies can either figure out how to work with FSF-authored licenses or they can go make their own alternatives. I have no sympathy for them.

Or for devs that make excuses for this attitude. They deserve to be force-pushed onto software like when Apple decided to ship zsh instead of bash because they didn't want GPLv3 in their OS. Or that whole Rails brouhaha last month.

Companies should not be trusted with permissively licensed software. You don't get to play shell games with public access.

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

#154

Post by PeterisP »

akulkarni wrote: post #116
PeterisP wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The freedom to run the software for any purpose is #1 on the list of software freedoms that would be called open source. No ifs, no buts, no checking whether you qualify - software is free if and only if you can run it for any purpose, everything else comes only after that basic freedom. Various viral conditions only affect the licensing of developer changes (while still not restricting the developers right to make a…

I appreciate this debate, but where do we label the Timescale License as open source? Incidentally, that clause exists as a clear line for value added products and services. Some companies have a restriction that says, "You can't compete with us." That approach struck us as arbitrarily blurry. We took a clear approach that says DML (inserting, querying data) is permitted, but not DDL (creating tables). Again, this is…

I apologize, I was sloppy at skimming the licence, it actually does clearly and properly delineate the open source and source-available, describing them appropriately.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

skipants wrote: post #149
api wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by josephcsible »

jpalomaki wrote: post #132
188201 wrote: 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…

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?

A company giving its own employees access to software for work use only doesn't count as distribution, but giving it to contractors can: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#InternalDistribu...

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

#157

Post by api »

slabity wrote: post #126
api wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A lot of the flavor of the week licenses exist for this reason, as well as to address some of the weak corner cases of the AGPL. I'm interested in what the 'weak corner cases' of AGPL are considering it was pretty much made to correct some weaknesses in the GPL.

It doesn't adequately handle the SaaSification case, which is when someone hosts the software behind a paywall. It only handles the "Tivoization" case when someone ships the software inside a closed source box.

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

#158

Post by jrv »

What I don't like about changes like this is that it makes it impossible to reuse any Grafana/Loki/Tempo pieces or libraries in any more permissively-licensed code without forcing that whole project into the AGPL as well. That doesn't only hinder competitors (which seems to be the legitimate goal), but also hinders interoperability and an open ecosystem evolving where people freely exchange bits and pieces of code to make things work together. I know that some parts of the codebases have been exempted from these changes (see https://twitter.com/TwitchiH/status/1384566382180896769), but those are only some, and they may change over time...

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

#159

Post by Dylan16807 »

gen220 wrote: post #71
nine_k wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

SQLite, Vim/Emacs, Linux, everything in GNU coreutils. All of the Apache projects (some to more/less an extant than others). Most programming language implementations (e.g. CPython). Memcached. WireGuard. SQLAlchemy. Web Frameworks like Flask, Django, Rails, on and on. There are many open source technologies that do not seek to capture the value they create with licensing hijinks. I don’t think it’s an accident, that…

> From your example, K8s will definitely outlive Google. Hard to say about Android.

What leads you to say that? I wouldn't be surprised if kubernetes is dead in 20 years. I would be very surprised if google is dead in 20 years.

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

#160

Post by eitland »

watermelon0 wrote: post #147
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.

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 a…

I've tried really hard to understand this a few times and yesterday or early today or something I found an interesting thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11354475

reitanqild seems to misunderstand and the other posters fill in with more information.

If the information in that thread is correct and I read it correctly it is totally fine to use an AGPL server that touches connects to a lot of stuff, it won't affect any of that.

Only if you somehow touches the codebase of the AGPL licensed code by modifying it or creating a combined work then the AGPL will take effect in the same way as today - except that allowing access to a running instance over a network will trigger it too, not only distribution of the binaries or the code.

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