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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

#191

Post by dcow »

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…

If you use a GPL library then your main work becomes GPL.

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

#192

Post by nopzor »

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…

do you think that earning money or having a viable business model is a bad thing?

look at our actions since the inception of the company, as well as our "big tent" philosophy; i think they speak for ourselves.

we built a sustainable business over the course of 4 years, prior to raising a dollar of VC money. we raised VC money to go even faster.

most of our VC money goes to paying our employees.

most of our employees are engineers.

most of what our engineers do is open source.

if we don't build a sustainable business, who will develop the software?

the overwhelming majority of development on things like grafana, loki, tempo are done by grafana labs employees. plus, we are the main contributors behind other OSS projects that we didn't create and don't own (like prometheus and cortex).

[note: am co-founder/ceo at grafana labs]

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

#193

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

mfreed wrote: post #128
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…

Hi PeterisP, just to avoid any confusion: The sentence you quote is actually meant to -technically- establish a basis for what it means for somebody to run/offer TimescaleDB as part of a value added service (very much allowed) versus a company like AWS offering TimescaleDB purely as a DBaaS offering (not allowed). There are many, many thousands of companies that use or embed TimescaleDB as part of their service or pr…

> a company like AWS offering TimescaleDB purely as a DBaaS offering (not allowed).

That restriction makes the license not Open Source. Open Source licenses MUST allow anyone to run the software, for any reason, by definition. Even "as-a-Service". It's a perfectly fine restriction to have, but it shouldn't be called an Open Source license.

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

#194

Post by aidenn0 »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #185

When we released our server product under GNU AGPL v3 license, we have received a rather negative reaction from other participants in our field. The general sentiment was, "this license makes a useless curiosity". I wonder where does this hostility come from. Jealosy? FUD? Frustration that they can't take the source and not share own improvements??

No lawyer wants to be the first one to adopt licenses with novel clauses because the legal system runs on precedent, so using something that is untested in court is higher risk.

It wasn't that long ago that no large company would touch the GPL with a 10 foot pole.

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

#195

Post by pvorb »

josephcsible wrote: post #166
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?

I think that by putting your software under AGPL the only effect you'll see is that it will be used less.

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

#196

Post by papito »

josephcsible wrote: post #21
the_duke wrote: 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.

Elastic made a massive blunder by open-sourcing Kibana. SumoLogic just took it and builtnon that. You open-source the underlying technology - not the product built on top of it.

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

#197

Post by nopzor »

mqus wrote: post #169
judofyr wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ecosyst…

thanks for saying the AGPL is nice; we think it strikes the right balance.

but, i'm curious to understand your perspective here.

do you mean to say that you'd never contribute to an apache licensed project?

anything that is apache licensed can be relicensed by the project, even if there isn't a CLA

[note: am co-founder/ceo at grafana labs]

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

#198

Post by jrv »

josephcsible wrote: post #190
jrv wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's both a completely unrealistic end goal (we live in the real world), and I also think that the AGPL puts you into a hole where you can never get out of again if you decided that you now need different constraints. So I really much more prefer permissive licenses. Funnily just before you wrote this comment, I also tweeted just that :) : https://twitter.com/juliusvolz/status/1384599249082626052

> I think it's both a completely unrealistic end goal I know :( I just meant it's the ideal we should strive towards, even if we never fully reach it.

If this incremental step led to a better world already, I would maybe agree... but I think it makes the whole ecosystem worse and worse, until some far-away tipping point is reached where almost everything is AGPL and can reuse each other again. And even then I'm not sure I'd be happy with the *GPL, as now you can't back out of it again in case you later discovered that it was the wrong decision, without getting the permission by all copyright holders.

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

#199

Post by dec0dedab0de »

atat7024 wrote: post #83
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…

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

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

If you only compare things above a certain quality threshold, That's true of any creative endeavor. Not too many people will say that Mcdonald's has the best burgers, or the pop singer of the week is their absolute favorite.

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

judofyr wrote: post #173
staticassertion wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I still think this sentence here is not quite precise enough: > 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. To me this sounds like the relicensing is done so that a few programmers finally can get paid for their hard labor while maintaining critical software we're all using. What's actually happening here…

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