Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3 • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by fader » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #258

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…

> 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. FreeBSD is 27 years old. Postgres is 24 years old. SQLite, which is placed in the public domain , is 20 years old. You will forgive me not holding…

I think that OSX co-opting BSD is a perfect example here, honestly.

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

#292

Post by gqewogpdqa » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 9:42 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #229

rustc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't make sense as far as I can tell. You would need to release the source code of the managed service you built around MongoDB.

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

#293

Post by josephcsible » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 9:42 PM UTC

bosswipe wrote: post #216

klelatti wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proprietary infrastructure = All infrastructure essentially. So you're fine with a license that can't be used for SaaS. So basically you're happy for the commercial internet to be powered by proprietary software - with all that would mean for free software.

That's pretty much the same as AGPL. A tell about OSI's biases is that AGPL and SSPL are basically the same but since Amazon's propaganda engine ramped up against SSPL it was labeled as somehow completely out of bounds.

> AGPL and SSPL are basically the same

Are you serious? Once you look past the most superficial level, they're not even close.

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

#294

Post by josephcsible » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

swyx wrote: post #263

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care so much about the AGPL specifically, but it's a single known license, rather than every time I find a new project having to find out what "interesting" license they cooked up this time.

yes but afaict SSPL was kiiinda becoming a de facto "f off AWS" license that was generally becoming standard. thats all any of these vendors want, they're not coming up with new licenses just for shits and giggles. standards evolve over time, it was entirely possible that Grafana could have thrown its weight behind SSPL and helped legitimize it more.

> Grafana could have thrown its weight behind SSPL and helped legitimize it more.

Which would not have been a good thing in any way, so I'm glad they didn't do that.

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

#295

Post by josephcsible » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #287

swyx wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes but afaict SSPL was kiiinda becoming a de facto "f off AWS" license that was generally becoming standard. thats all any of these vendors want, they're not coming up with new licenses just for shits and giggles. standards evolve over time, it was entirely possible that Grafana could have thrown its weight behind SSPL and helped legitimize it more.

This would've been nice. I think we are not far from the OSI having to recognize that SSPL is the future whether they like it or not, and possibly moving from obstructionist to a more constructive point, where they help evolve the SSPL to address their concerns, while recognizing that it is a copyleft open source license.

A license doesn't get to be called open source just because it's popular. Look how popular Windows is. Is it open source too?

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

#296

Post by gen220 » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #271

gen220 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 did not mean to say that open-source software (broadly, MIT-licensed) and free software (broadly, GPL-licensed) don't do well! They do, and I'm happy about it. Some have commercial entities around them, but most don't. What I was trying to say is that FOSS was never about capturing commercial value, and always about capturing the value of the freedom to inspect, share, and tweak. In this regard, going AGPL is prefe…

Ah yeah! We totally agree! I was finding it hard to respond to your comment initially because I didn’t know which point you were trying to make, mentioning Android and K8s.

I totally agree that the “we are now AGPL” route is preferable.

FWIW MongoDB was already AGPL, but that wasn’t enough for them I guess, they wanted more money. Old HN thread on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452

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

#297

Post by xbar » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

DetroitThrow wrote: post #288

nopzor wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm glad you were able to find a FOSS license that's able to support your business. I think grafana lab's use of AGPL will help encourage its adoption by other businesses wanting to make money in free software as well. For other's who are interested, here's a faq from grafana including a discussion about "Why AGPL and not SSPL?": https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relic...

Very much this.

As a commercial consumer of FOSS, AGPL has been troubling for me. As a non-commercial hacker, AGPL has been fine for me: GPL is fine here, and distribution as defined by SaaS or tarball is equivalent; I share back.

My opinions are that non-commercial FOSS projects probably shouldn't choose AGPL but that small-ish commercial FOSS projects (like Grafana, et al) probably should so that big commercial entities don't eat their lunch.

AGPL seemed like a tool that was mostly ahead of its time but is nice to have now.

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

#298

Post by SXX » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

bosswipe wrote: post #216

klelatti wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proprietary infrastructure = All infrastructure essentially. So you're fine with a license that can't be used for SaaS. So basically you're happy for the commercial internet to be powered by proprietary software - with all that would mean for free software.

That's pretty much the same as AGPL. A tell about OSI's biases is that AGPL and SSPL are basically the same but since Amazon's propaganda engine ramped up against SSPL it was labeled as somehow completely out of bounds.

How are they pretty much the same? AGPL only require the changes to the software itself to be shared under AGPL and it's apply the same requirement for everyone.

SSPL require to release source code for every piece of your infrastructure if your business model seems like Amazon. This is descrimination which both FSF and OSI are not allow.

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

#299

Post by josephcsible » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

Seirdy wrote: post #222

jrv wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with the substance of what you said, but I'm going to nitpick a bit of wording: what you call "developer freedom" isn't freedom at all, and is more rightly called power.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.en.html

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

#300

Post by soenkeliebau » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 9:51 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #253

soenkeliebau wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The question is whether the alternatives are any better; IMO, this is unlikely (all the others I've seen make tradeoffs that I'd consider poor, personally). I think the virality and companies not liking it is the license working as intended, honestly; it's supposed to be viral, that's the point of copyleft, and obviously companies take issue with that (although I agree that some of this might be misunderstanding scop…

My personal opinion (and it is really just that - I cannot prove anything I say here) is that for a lot of those companies it is actually the risk of not being able to tell exactly what the AGPL would affect that is the main factor.

As I said, I'm explicitly not mentioning any alternative here because they all have issues, but the AGPL's wording is much more complicated than most and that (perceived) insecurity around it is my main criticism.