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

501–510 of 578 posts

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

#501

Post by tlamponi »

globular-toast wrote: post #473
toddpersen wrote: post #409

The funny thing to me, which I haven't seen anyone else mention yet, is that way, way back in the old days, Grafana started out as a fork of Kibana. Go take a look at the first commit in the Grafana source: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/commit/75d03fc49ab4f95ee4... Anyone want to guess what the third commit was? That's right, it was an Apache 2 license: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/commits/master?after=2bb…

What do you mean? Any free software licence allows forks, including AGPL.

Yeah, that's pretty speculative to assume what would have been, but forking and improving/shifting direction of kibana would have been definitively possible from a license POV.

Their FAQ even says:

> I asked Torkel, and he said that If Kibana had been an AGPL project, Grafana would likely have been AGPL from day one.

https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relic...

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

#502

Post by rocqua »

sideeffffect wrote: post #204

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 tas…

Usually part of the CLA is meant to allow dual licensing. The idea is that the company also makes the software available under a commercial non-viral license.

Hence if you contribute to a GPL project with a CLA, some companies could still publish your code closed source through a commercial license deal.

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

#503

Post by keonix »

cevian wrote: post #419
foerbert wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole issue arose from the claim that the Timescale license was designed to be less restrictive then the AGPL. That's why Open Source came up in the first place - pointing out that one of the basic reasons for the Timescale license to exist in the first place is to restrict one of the major reasons Open Source licenses exist.

That only makes sense if you agree with the open source foundation definition of restrictive. I don't. I think the ability to freely link to whatever other software is much more important to most people than the ability to run a *aaS. We never made any claims about open source only our opinion about what restrictive means to us.

AGPL license clearly gives you the ability to freely link with whatever software you want. The only requirement is to share it with your customers. Following your logic it could be said that MIT licensed software could not be freely used because it requires preservation of original copyright notice

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

#504

Post by jillesvangurp »

sideeffffect wrote: post #204

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 tas…

It's a very good point. IMHO copy right transfers are something to be wary off. Any company that practices that can do a bait and switch on the license. I see it has a hard requirement for long term success of an OSS community to have a large and active community of copyright holders.

IMHO who holds the copyright is more important than the actual license. Anything OSI endorsed should be fine. However, AGPL to me screams "talk to us about buying a special license if you want to use this commercially". That requires copy right transfers. AGPL without copyright transfers does not make sense for companies for this reason.

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

#505

Post by SuperQue »

__david__ wrote: post #349
SuperQue wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wrot…

Does clause (d) allow the project to relicense its code? Because as far as I understand, that is the reason that GNU tends to have CLAs on their projects.

I'm no expert in these things, but here's my understanding.

AFAIK, it's up to copyright assignment for re-licensing.

For example, contributing to Prometheus assigns all copyright to "The Prometheus Authors". The DCO just attests that it's OK to do this.

So, I don't think there's anything for or against re-licensing in DCO, it's just out of scope.

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

#506

Post by 4bpp »

bayindirh wrote: post #500

Why there's a prevailing hate against xGPL licenses? Almost all of the core infrastructure which runs this Apache/BSD/MIT licensed software is running on xGPL software. I believe that we wouldn't be here without these aggressive copyleft licenses, and some developers embracing this license again is a good thing. I'll always prefer Nextcloud because it's AGPL. Similarly I'll use Grafana with less hesitation since it'l…

I assume the answer to the "why" can be as simple as: being primarily a Silicon Valley software industry forum, HN knows what side its bread is buttered on (namely the side of cobbling together freely available software to make proprietary products).

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

#507

Post by bayindirh »

4bpp wrote: post #506
bayindirh wrote: post #500

Why there's a prevailing hate against xGPL licenses? Almost all of the core infrastructure which runs this Apache/BSD/MIT licensed software is running on xGPL software. I believe that we wouldn't be here without these aggressive copyleft licenses, and some developers embracing this license again is a good thing. I'll always prefer Nextcloud because it's AGPL. Similarly I'll use Grafana with less hesitation since it'l…

I assume the answer to the "why" can be as simple as: being primarily a Silicon Valley software industry forum, HN knows what side its bread is buttered on (namely the side of cobbling together freely available software to make proprietary products).

Thanks for your answer. Yes, the answer is simple when you only consider the HN scope however, this is a trend I observe for much longer, well before I found here.

Maybe my observation on other places was a reflection of SV mentality, who knows.

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

#508

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

rakoo wrote: post #86
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.

> Cloud providers must share contributions To be really strict: AGPL only mandates that contributions be shared with the user. The freedom of users is more important than the freedom of developers. Of course an upstream maintainer can be a user and get the contributions.

> The freedom of users is more important than the freedom of developers.

This is misleading. All developers are users as well. Having to use closed source services and tools impacts us a lot.

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

#509

Post by tremon »

goodpoint wrote: post #374
m4rtink wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, GPL is about freedom for the users , not necessarily for the developers.

Every developer is also an user. And "user" freedom is more important because we use tenths of millions of SLOC and do development work on a small fraction.

The copyright holder is never a user in a discussion about distribution rights, though.

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

#510

Post by tremon »

ezrast wrote: post #379
jordigh wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> projects now cannot use 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 copyl…

On the contrary, AGPL (and GPL) cannot be combined with any other license. See section 5c: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

Ok, quoting section 5c:

c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.

This only says that the product of such a combination must be licensed as AGPL. The MIT/BSD licenses (with or without the attribution clause) specifically allow being included in larger works under any license, even proprietary, so what are you arguing exactly?

Post reply on HN