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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

#561

Post by genocidicbunny »

leeoniya wrote: post #549
varajelle wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The license talk about derived work. And even if every line of code has been changed, it is still a derived work as it was progressively changed. So pattern and desings from the original are still in use. The Ship of Theseus is still the Ship of Theseus.

> The Ship of Theseus is still the Ship of Theseus. you state this as if it's a settled fact (it isn't). If you take a Shakespeare novel and replace every word in it with another word, and then remove and add many chapters to it, then shuffle all the pages, is it still a Shakespeare work or even recognizable as being derived from one? I think most would say "no". In the case of Ship of Theseus, if you replaced every…

Humour me, why must there be such a threshold?

If version B is modified from version A as a derivative work (therefore licensed as A) and version C is modified from version B as a derivative work of B, then would C not still be licensed same as B, and therefore A?

It seems it depends on how you view the accumulation of differences. If your only comparison is always against version A, then yes, eventually there must be enough accumulation of differences that one could claim a work is no longer derivative. But if you consider all versions between A and yours, then suddenly its just a series of gradual changes, none of which individually cause the work to become non-derivative. The Ship of Theseus parable seems to also fit this latter interpretation more -- it is after all about replacing items one at a time.

I agree with you from a practical legal point though. My argument above seems to imply that there's only been derived work since the first cell split in two. In practice this would be a nightmare; There should be a threshold whereupon a work can qualify on its own merits.

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

#562

Post by tremon »

clusterfish wrote: post #558
Seirdy wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws exist ideally to limit freedoms whose exercise comes with externalities that end up reducing the freedom for others. These range from freedoms to cause harm to others (steal, assault, enslave), to freedoms to sell food without disclosing ingredients, to freedoms to run a business without transparently reporting financial information. The idea of greater freedoms depending on lesser restrictions is not novel. > L…

If developers only get paid for selling auxiliary services, no one actually gets paid to write and improve the software, only to sell services. That's a rotten incentive structure. Most consumer software doesn't in fact need any auxiliary services. It just needs work put in to actually build it, and that work needs to be paid for. Props to Red Hat for earning money from enterprise clients. That model only works if yo…

no one actually gets paid to write and improve the software, only to sell services. That's a rotten incentive structure.

That incentive structure is universal though. A builder also doesn't get paid directly to maintain his toolset, that cost is included in how he charges for his services. A hospital doesn't charge you for the laundry/cleaning services, it's included in their service bill. If a farmer's combine harvester breaks down, he can't just up the price of his wheat twenty-fold to pay for a new one.

There is a market for selling shrink-wrapped software, see e.g. Microsoft, Nintendo, Apple. Invariably these products are proprietary, because Free Software uses a different paradigm: under the free software/open source model, software is a tool, not a product.

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

#563

Post by jblwps »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #211

I like the AGPL, but I would like an extra step that forces you to distribute code even you have not modified it. This would be in the case of the original being unavailable for some reason. Does anyone know how difficult it would be to have the login page for a web app be a different license? The idea being that the only users of the AGPL code are ones that have a valid account. Off the top of my head a reverse prox…

> I like the AGPL, but I would like an extra step that forces you to distribute code even you have not modified it.

This is...already the case. The distributor is the one who is bound to supply the source code--"upstream" isn't implicated in the license.

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

#564

Post by gqewogpdqa »

gen220 wrote: post #554
gqewogpdqa wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really appreciate the constructive response back. From reading all the press, it feels like MongoDB did not do this to garner more revenue but to instead prevent open-source parasites from causing MongoDB to lose money or even go out of business. When I read Eliot's posts in 2018, it feels like he's trying to stay in business, not be greedy. From a commercial point of view, databases have been shown to need managem…

I appreciate yours as well! I agree that, from a commercial point of view, databases have been shown to need management. > As to harm to the open source ecosystem, cloud providers wrapping managed services around databases has been shown to stifle innovation on those open source products I don't think we agree on this. I think PostgreSQL has improved dramatically in the past 5 years, coinciding with (but perhaps not…

I get your point, and thanks for the discussion. My thought is that even software with an OSI approved license can be moved to a non-OSI license at any time. So you can't actually insure against the dystopian future you are concerned about. The only way to insure against that is if the software IP is not owned by a company. It will be interesting to see how this plays out with TimescaleDB, Confluent, Starburst, Grafana, and a host of others - none of their code is owned by a foundation (like PostgreSQL is) but is instead owned by a company. And those companies have ( and will continue to ) do thing that protect their customers, employees, and stakeholders. Thanks for the clarifications - I understand now better the concerns of the OSI-favorable community.

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

#565

Post by pauldix »

toddpersen wrote: post #481
lmm wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO, his answer doesn't address the GP’s point; that the original, permissive license inherited from Kibana arguably enabled the growth & survival of Grafana. Why's that? If Kibana had been AGPL and Grafana had been AGPL from day 1, how would the growth and survival of Grafana have been any different?

Would Torkel have decided to fork Kibana in the first place if it were AGPL? Would the same level of community have formed around Grafana? Would it have received as many contributions and support for new backends? Would Raj have wanted to acquire Torkel + Grafana for the original Raintank company if it were an AGPL project? Would they have been able to as successfully build and monetize a Grafana Enterprise product w…

The Grafana Enterprise point is the most salient here. The answer is no, they wouldn't have been able to create closed source plugins for a commercial product. Only AGPL code. As I've stated before: copyleft licenses are an evolutionary dead end: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/copyleft-and-community-licen....

P.S. Hey Todd ;)

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

#566

Post by hakre »

guiriduro wrote: post #516
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…

I think I'm right in saying that, providing you fork from any commit before the introduction of the AGPL license, you can continue with Apache-licensed Grafana. Sounds like the way forward.

You mean when you would have forked before the new licensing became effective?

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

#567

Post by hakre »

cutemonster wrote: post #522
varajelle wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The license talk about derived work. And even if every line of code has been changed, it is still a derived work as it was progressively changed. So pattern and desings from the original are still in use. The Ship of Theseus is still the Ship of Theseus.

> it is still a derived work as it was progressively changed. I think that depends. If it was progressively changed to something completely different, then, no. Let's say in 10 days you replaced 10% of the code, with the same amount of code from a different program by another author. During those 10 days there'd be compilation errors, and thereafter the original work and copyright would be all gone (except for in old…

It is still likely a derived work. Looks more to me in the example it was just practised the right to make changes to the original work which one could do under the given circumstances which is normally a reciprocal license - floss or else - which means even when if 100% of all letters in all files have been changed, one could still not do more than the original license granted.

and that is normally _not_ what you wrote:

> the copyright holder [sic!] of the new program could license it however s/he wanted.

However if sole copyright holder - real, not imagined - she sure can license it - or not. Or different another day.

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

#568

Post by peterbonney »

sokoloff wrote: post #495
peterbonney wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the end though I highly doubt that's whats going to happen. The most likely outcome is that we just get told to get rid of Grafana and use something else. Whatever you replace it with will have the same licensing overhead. Again, this makes no sense. If you said we can’t afford to pay for it, fine. But you explicitly said you don’t think cost is an issue. Maybe I’m making the wrong inference, but it sounds like…

I think you’re getting the essential facts but drawing a conclusion that is still wrong, at least for some people/companies. “What can I do with Grafana in my business under GPL?” is much more clearly defined than the same question changing only the last word to AGPL. Alternatives available under Apache v2 or other non-copyleft licenses are also clear. For GPL, all I need to be careful to avoid doing is distributing…

Losing users and contributors, sure.

Losing users who would otherwise be willing to pay for a commercial license (as the OP said they are) that could be negotiated to explicitly cover whatever future use case they’re concerned about? That makes no sense.

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

#569

Post by __david__ »

dkarras wrote: post #528
__david__ wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your software never "becomes" GPL, no matter what. That's the problem with the "viral" label, it's somewhat of a misnomer that implies that anything that comes into contact with it gets infected and suddenly all your private IP _has_ to be released and anyone can just take it an fork it. In reality, your proprietary code can only be GPLed if you explicitly release it under that license. What people are confusing is t…

Sorry I still don't get it. Please tell me which step I am getting wrong: I have my own proprietary code. I decide to make use of GPL code. Then I distribute the binaries. Now I have to make the source available, correct? This source that was just made available (that includes my "proprietary code" and the GPL library I used) needs a license. At this step, I already lost my proprietary code and made it public - which…

> Now I have to make the source available, correct?

Nope! That's one way to fix the licensing issue—but you're not forced to do that.

Another option would be to immediately stop distributing your binary and not distribute it again until you can replace or otherwise excise the GPL code that caused the licensing issue.

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

#570

Post by clusterfish »

tremon wrote: post #562
clusterfish wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If developers only get paid for selling auxiliary services, no one actually gets paid to write and improve the software, only to sell services. That's a rotten incentive structure. Most consumer software doesn't in fact need any auxiliary services. It just needs work put in to actually build it, and that work needs to be paid for. Props to Red Hat for earning money from enterprise clients. That model only works if yo…

no one actually gets paid to write and improve the software, only to sell services. That's a rotten incentive structure. That incentive structure is universal though. A builder also doesn't get paid directly to maintain his toolset, that cost is included in how he charges for his services. A hospital doesn't charge you for the laundry/cleaning services, it's included in their service bill. If a farmer's combine harve…

> A builder also doesn't get paid directly to maintain his toolset, that cost is included in how he charges for his services

Of course. That's not a problem, because the toolset isn't the builder's product. Their customers don't care about the toolset, they actually want the service. Conversely, most consumer software users don't want or need your services, they just need the software.

Moreover, that toolset you mentioned belongs to that builder only. It's not a resource shared by all the builders in the world, unlike open source software.

It's not surprising that people pontificating about the morality of copyleft vs proprietary don't even seem to understand the basic economic effects of shared ownership like the tragedy of the commons.

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