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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

#221

Post by josephcsible »

iFire wrote: post #14
josephcsible wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a specific conflict like ZFS-on-Linux that you want to avoid, or are you just asking "how can I most benefit from other people's work without letting anyone else benefit from mine?"

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.

I think you misunderstand the ZFS-on-Linux situation. The problem with that is that ZFS is licensed under the CDDL, and Linux is licensed under the GPL, both of which are FOSS licenses, but there's no legal way to combine them. In your situation, it sounds like there is a legal way to combine them, and you just don't like the license that it would require you to release your code under.

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

#222

Post by Seirdy »

jrv wrote: post #168
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 on…

That's kind of the point. The purpose of MIT/BSD is to enable nonfree derivative works; the purpose of the AGPL is to only allow free derivatives. AGPL maximizes freedom by prohibiting further restriction of it; it's a local maxima of "user freedom" as a function of "developer freedom".

If you want to use AGPL software in your project, you're free to relicense under AGPL.

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

#223

Post by darkwater »

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…

Do you need to release as GPL the code of a program runnning on GNU/Linux? The answer is no. The same applies to software interacting with AGPL Postgres using the postgre protocol. If you are AWS and gives access to customers to modified versions of AGPL Postgresql you AWS must release your patches over Postgresql. IANAL and all that jazz, also I'm not that sure about the typical cloud vendor secret sauce that controls automation etc. Most of it it's probably external enough and not covered by AGPL but there might be some exceptions.

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

#224

Post by tarsinge »

dcow wrote: post #191
api wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are talking about products here.

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

#225

Post by rover0 »

dcow wrote: post #191
api wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you use a GPL library and don't make the main work GPL you're committing copyright infingement. Your work will never magically become GPL.

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

#226

Post by zokier »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #107
swyx wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using AGPL is so much better than flavor-of-the-week license license noob here - can you elaborate on why exactly it is so much better?

AGPL is a license qualifying the criteria of OSI's OpenSource definition and FSF's Free Software definition. A key point there is that a user can use the software quite freely without restrictions only with the caveat that modifications have to be made available to users. (AGPL is slighqtly more complex) Many of the "modern" licenses allow to look at code, but prevent distribution and/or modification and/or usage. Th…

Notably AGPL is also DFSG free, meaning that AGPL licensed software can be included in Debian and its derivatives. I believe its also fine in other major distros (RHEL/SuSE etc).

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

#227

Post by rover0 »

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…

It does not stop all those companies using linux. The Jeff Bezos days are over.

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

#228

Post by nopzor »

jrv wrote: post #208
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you realize that if you contribute to a company apache project without a CLA, they can change the license out from under you to _any_ license that they want, right?

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

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

#229

Post by zokier »

rustc wrote: post #50
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…

Mongo and ElasticSearch are completely different though. Related to those licenses: Has there been any clarification of what exactly you need to release for free if you use them to offer a SaaS? > If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of t…

> If I use S3 to store data for my Mongo SaaS, do I need to call Bezos and buy the complete source code of S3?

Yes.

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

#230

Post by SuperQue »

nopzor wrote: post #197
mqus wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

The problem is CLAs.

They are a much higher barrier to entry for a lot of contributors. No, they're not all the same, but they make it harder. Each CLA needs to be reviewed and approved by company lawyers. It's kinda like creating a brand new OSS license that way.

To use a concrete example, the Google open source CLA is awful. At my previous job our lawyers refused to sign off the Google CLA. One of my engineers wrote a patch that we wanted to get upstream. Since, it would be generally useful.

Basically, the patch could never be merged, because we had a legal stalemate between us and Google.

I would highly recommend using https://developercertificate.org/ instead. This is what we use for Prometheus. It's also used for GPL projects like Linux. It's simple, standard, and used widely.

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