241–250 of 578 posts
In effect, it becomes a weak copyleft- akin to MPL-2.0 where as long as you keep it in separate files code can stay closed-source.
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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.
While I want to disagree with you on the general principle (and gen220's sibling comment points out several really nice longer-term examples), I will certainly admit that you have a point. Cloud providers eating the margins, investing in streamlined operations and in general making the earlier on-prem consulting work less attractive has had an effect. But I do note that your examples are from quite a narrow sector. T…
> ß: Our frontend team will probably want to roast me for that one, but there isn't much visible JS left in modern React code. Not for my eyes, at least.
Can you clarify what you're talking about here with regards to React? I can see calling JSX a DSL, but React is a language now? And there's no JS / TypeScript in your React code base?
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…
> 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…
I'm not sure I agree. Yes, standardization is a good thing and AGPL is the "known evil", but having read it I do think that it is a very very complex piece of text - personally I'd go so far as to say that it is close to incomprehensible and would prefer pretty much anything else.
But even aside from that the sheer number of companies that point blank ban AGPL licensed software from being used in their stack could be used as an indicator as well. Though this may be due to the common misunderstanding that it is a viral license, which just goes back to my prior point on it not being clearly worded.
I won't even mention alternatives, I'm sure they all have issues, it is a complex topic, but if it were up to me the AGPL would not be my first license choice.
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??
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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.
While it is true that Grafana's new license is still FOSS not every company, public cloud provider is willing to accept the AGPLv3 license[1]. Hence a fork with the old license is not unlikely. [1] https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/
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??
One of the cool things about open source is that you can go and use Open Source code for things that the original author may have never even thought of. So your implementation of some novel algorithm might end up being useful in some situation that you were not aware of or maybe did not even exist when you wrote the code. While it seems idealistic, it is not that uncommon.
Now for the GPL license, depending on version, it is not a huge deal if you borrow GPL code. It is a fairly standard license that a lot of projects use. And of course GPL is compatible with a lot of different licenses, making it possible to distribute your projects under the terms of the GPL including code with compatible licensing.
Something interesting to note is that AGPLv1 is not GPL compatible. AGPLv3 is not GPLv2 compatible. GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are compatible, since GPLv3 was written to intentionally allow this usage. (Note: IANAL or an expert; so this should be taken with a grain of salt.)
In the end, this is why permissive licenses have gained a lot of popularity. It is immensely aggravating to people when things that are technically possible and not spiritually immoral are prevented by legal barriers that feel unnecessary. When the ZFS on Linux project faces trouble because of software licensing, it feels like a farce and a waste of time and resources.
Now imagine that the reasoning for the license choices being incompatible was not to protect user rights, and not simply a matter of differing policies between different organizations and their open source releases, but rather transparently a ploy to protect a profit model. This is where people's aggravation turns to anger, because it then feels like the open source label is being used to pull people in, then the more restrictive licenses are being used to seek rent forever after.
The reality is obviously not quite that grim. In fact, perhaps because of licenses like the Timescale license and SSPL, people have come around to AGPL in quite a significant way. The Overton window of open source licenses from corporate open source releases may have tilted a bit more towards the 'restrictive' side.
I don't think there's anything actually immoral about protecting one's own profit model. It does, at least in some sense, dilute what it means for software to be open source; if AGPL becomes popular, it will be more likely to encumber more projects with its requirements. Of course, in many cases, the ownership of the copyright will be spread among multiple parties, and so everyone is on a level playing field, and so other than the burden of ensuring you adhere to the restriction there's no real reason to feel that it is 'unfair' anymore than copyleft licenses already are.
At the end of the day, GPL was a legal solution to a community problem, and it imperfectly encodes an idea. There is no perfect encoding of that idea, so it is bound to cause some frustration for where the expectations mismatch with reality.
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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?
Maybe I want to keep my software under a permissive license? AGPL would also infect my code, no? And what if we're talking about proprietary code that doesn't have much to do with Grafana and only uses it for monitoring?
You only have to license your own software as AGPL if it is a derivative work of another AGPL licensed program.
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…
They can, they just don't want to because they want to ensure other people can produce non-free work.
Remove the desire to produce non-free work and you can perfectly legally put copylefted code into weakly-licensed free code. Weak licenses don't forbid this. Copyleft licenses don't forbid this. There's no need for anyone to change the license or copyright to combine weak licenses with copyleft licenses.
Copyleft licenses forbid proprietary code. And proprietary licenses forbid a lot of other things.
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…
>Yes; if you're going to do this, then using AGPL is so much better than flavor-of-the-week license. I'm not sure I agree. Yes, standardization is a good thing and AGPL is the "known evil", but having read it I do think that it is a very very complex piece of text - personally I'd go so far as to say that it is close to incomprehensible and would prefer pretty much anything else. But even aside from that the sheer nu…
Alternatively, catering to those companies wouldn't bring relevant benefits to the project anyway