Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3

grafana.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 578 posts

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

#201

Post by dec0dedab0de »

jrv wrote: post #183
josephcsible wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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

If you're the copyright holder you can relicense anytime you want. You're never stuck.

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

#202

Post by HideousKojima »

pvorb wrote: post #176
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.

But if my proprietary SaaS only uses Grafana for monitoring but its key purpose is doing something else entirely, I can no longer use Grafana unless I also publish my SaaS under AGPLv3, right? What if I release my own SaaS as AGPLv3? Do others, who rely on it, also have to license their software under AGPLv3? I think this kills many business cases. Am I missing some key point?

>I can no longer use Grafana unless I also publish my SaaS under AGPLv3, right?

If you link to it directly from your code then yes, unless you're willing to pay Grafana for a commercial license (assuming they offer one or you can negotiate one with them). If you have Grafana running on your servers but you aren't using the code in your own applications then you're generally fine (the GPL is generally recognized as ending where a process ends). And that's the point of the GPL/AGPL, you get the code for free, with the only expectation being that you pass it on if you make any changes.

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

#203

Post by jrv »

pvorb wrote: post #195
josephcsible wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, already thinking about alternatives to Grafana in the long term now...

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

#204

Post by sideeffffect »

If I contribute a code under the new CLA, is Grafana Labs allowed to relicense that contribution under a non-copyleft license, like Apache Public License 2.0, without my further permission?

If yes, than it's a really bad bad thing and I hope they change it.

CLAs that permit relicensing for a project that already uses permissive license is fine and fair. But doing that on a project with a copyleft license is a bad taste. It would enable Grafana Labs to give Grafana to a party X which can then give it to party Y, where X isn't required to give all the necessary freedoms to Y.

https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2014/jun/09/do-not-need-cla/

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

#205

Post by valyala »

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…

I fully support this statement. I'm core developer of open-source monitoring solution - VictoriaMetrics [1]. It is licensed under Apache 2 and we have no plans to change the license, since it may complicate user experience. VictoriaMetrics makes "value capture" by more future-proof means:

* By providing easy-to-setup-and-operate solution

* By focusing on the performance and minimal resource usage

* By providing good integration with other monitoring solutions

[1] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics

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

#206

Post by t-writescode »

bboreham wrote: post #17
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.

Would you consider paying for a licence to use it?

If I was in charge of the money, assuming it’s a reasonable price for on-prem Grafana, I would pay for a license to Grafana, just to not have the licensing stress.

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

#207

Post by josephcsible »

jrv wrote: post #203
pvorb wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep, already thinking about alternatives to Grafana in the long term now...

Why? If your software is already all available under permissive licenses, what does Grafana's new license require of you that you weren't already doing?

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

#208

Post by jrv »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #201
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

If you're the copyright holder you can relicense anytime you want. You're never stuck.

Yeah, which is why typically those companies make external contributors sign a CLA that allows for copyright assignment and relicensing. Which is annoying if you contribute to a company-owned project under a permissive license to help make it big and successful, and then they change the license under you. But yeah, then they could switch it around in both directions if they get all the rights signed away to them.

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

#209

Post by aidenn0 »

iFire wrote: post #26
iFire wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. This is the ZFS-on-Linux situation. I prefer to keep all my code as much as possible mit and I share them on Github. This is my mode of operation. Grafana makes me unable to use MIT for that use.

The AGPL3 license means that all my MIT code I distribute in a package will be considered AGPL3. So I can't combine Grafana, and my original work and improve both. This is a stated purpose of GPL3 / AGPL3. I am happy to be told I am wrong and it is possible.

IANAL, but pretty sure you can license all of your code MIT, while also making it part of an AGPLv3 system; someone else can already distrubute your MIT licensed code under AGPL3, since that would comply with the terms of the MIT license.

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

#210

Post by kelnos »

api wrote: post #157
slabity wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Are you sure? AGPL was written expressly to deal with SaaSification. Wikipedia seems to agree with me, at least[0]:

"Both versions of the Affero GPL were designed to close a perceived application service provider (ASP) loophole in the ordinary GPL, where, by using but not distributing the software, the copyleft provisions are not triggered. Each version differs from the version of the GNU GPL on which it is based in having an added provision addressing use of software over a computer network. This provision requires that the full source code be made available to any network user of the AGPL-licensed work, typically a web application."

The non-Affero GPLv3 handles Tivoization, FWIW.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

Post reply on HN