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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

#161

Post by staticassertion »

judofyr wrote: post #130
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…

> 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. […] It's a very measured and thoughtful way to ensure the long term progress and continuity of these projects. Ahem: Grafana Labs Brings In $50M Series B For Open-Source Developer Platform: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/grafana-labs-brings-in-50m-... I compl…

> Now they need the relicensing in order for the business model to remain viable.

This is exactly what the parent is saying though. They're going through this process to ensure that their business remains viable and they can continue to build and support the project.

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

#162

Post by cardanome »

lacker wrote: post #103
bostik wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Three of the four are in fact outliers: Kubernetes and Android are both financially backed by Google. Is that really "outlier" behavior? More and more important open source projects are prominently backed by a single large tech company. React, TensorFlow, TypeScript, Go, etc. If you just look at the last decade, there has been more important work done as "single-sponsor open source" than under the GPL.

A few monopolistic corporations having dictatorial power over key technologies is a dystopian nightmare.

Those projects have ultimately the interests of the corporations in mind not of the users.

Ever wonder why overcomplicated technical solutions are hyped so much? Why does everyone and their dog need to run Kubernetes? Why is it all Maschine Learning instead of good old fashioned methods that would do much better? Well those corporation have just the fitting cloud computing offering!

Sure many of them happen to be useful and are simply for increasing the prestige of the company but let's not act like it is a good thing.

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

#163

Post by josephcsible »

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.

I wish people would stop equating what Grafana did with what Elastic did. Grafana switched from one FOSS license to another. Elastic switched from a FOSS license to a proprietary license.

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

#164

Post by macnale »

josephcsible wrote: post #113
macnale wrote: post #98

1) We distribute Grafana as docker container along with our product to customers. What is the impact for us and our customers? 2) We build Grafana on a platform which is not supported by out of the box. What is the impact for us and our customers?

You'll need to give your customers the source code you used to build Grafana. If your customers are just using it internally, then they have no new obligations. If they're letting customers of their own use it, then they have the same new obligations that you do.

Thank you for clarification. I read about Confluents decision about the license change. It looks like Confluent has opposite view than Grafana labs about AGPL.

" Why didn’t Confluent use AGPL? AGPL doesn’t solve the problem we are trying to fix. AGPL allows cloud service providers to sell services using the exact software being licensed, and charge for it, without any limitation. This means the software developer has become the unpaid developer and maintainer for the cloud service provider—which is not a scenario we want to enable.

Also, AGPL is too aggressive for our customers who need to redistribute commercial products. If you put AGPL code in a distributed program, you have to open source the whole program. We want you to be able to embed our code in proprietary applications, change it and not worry about open sourcing any of your changes. We don’t think that proprietary applications are bad, and we think it’s great if you use Confluent Community software to create them.:"

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

#165

Post by dkarras »

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…

Curious about how the GPL is not viral... Unless you go through the hoops of making sure GPL code is sectioned (through a shared library or whatever) in your codebase, then your software becomes GPL, no? I mean sometimes you can avoid it so that the GPL project stands at an arms length to your own code but it is not always trivial. You just don't get to include the code in your project and not get "infected". The fact that you can sometimes circumvent the infection does not mean it is not viral because I believe it violates the "spirit" of the license anyways.

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

#166

Post by josephcsible »

jrv wrote: post #158

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…

IMO, the ideal end-state from a software freedom perspective is that all software becomes AGPL. This change is a step in that direction, not only with the directly affected products, but for the reasons you mentioned, an additional pressure for more things to switch to it. Do you not like that end goal, or do you just think the side effects of the change outweigh the benefits of getting closer to it?

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

#168

Post by jrv »

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.

That sounds nice in theory, but the reality is also that a lot of more permissively licensed (BSD / Apache) projects now cannot use (most) parts of Grafana / Loki / Tempo anymore, since realistically they won't be able to or want to switch to the AGPL as well (because of all the pain that would incur on others, in turn). That means that basically the whole free code sharing idea goes out of the window, at least in one direction – Grafana can of course still integrate code from more permissively licensed projects into their codebase.

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

#169

Post by mqus »

judofyr wrote: post #130
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…

> 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. […] It's a very measured and thoughtful way to ensure the long term progress and continuity of these projects. Ahem: Grafana Labs Brings In $50M Series B For Open-Source Developer Platform: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/grafana-labs-brings-in-50m-... I compl…

I agree.

AGPL is nice and all but for contributors this does not really matter at all because of the CLAs.

I will never contribute to projects which reserve the right to relicense, e.g. take ownership over my contributions, however small or big they are. I think companies will do the same.

If they would remove the CLAs, they would signal to companies and contributors that they are serious in providing an open ecosystem, to which other people contribute willingly "for free". But currently they are not, likely because they fear competition.

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

#170

Post by akulkarni »

jchw wrote: post #82
akulkarni wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

That is fair, and we do not claim that Timescale License is open source. (Our Apache 2 core codebase however is open source.)
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