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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

#401

Post by jordigh »

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

That doesn't say you cannot combine it. It's saying what you have to do when you do combine it. It's not a restriction against combining it.

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

#402

Post by Dylan16807 »

jchw wrote: post #246
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #185

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??

The same reason some people dislike the GPL, but a bit more extreme. 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,…

> 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.

Anyone interpreting AGPL that way is being ridiculous, though. If you treat the software as fully open source then AGPL doesn't harm you and there is no rent seeking. Any paid licenses are only for companies that don't want to embrace that piece of software being open source.

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

#403

Post by throwaway2037 »

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…

These are good questions. Regarding the premise, you wrote: >

The last part surprised me. For most projects, they don't need to modify the source code of the database engine. They only need to use the database to create a schema and store data.

Can you share more about what you meant by "modify it to my needs"? It would be helpful if you could provide one specific example.

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

#404

Post by nopzor »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #364
nopzor wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

How do you figure? The way I've understood it is part of the point of CLA's is to allow license changes, and that without them no license changes are possible to community projects. Because all the contributors own the copyright to the code they contributed, which they licensed under the existing license. To change the license you'd need to contact all the contributors and get permission (so okay, not impossible, jus…

anyone can change the license of apache software, without any permission. the right to do so is built into the apache license.

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

#405

Post by ezoe »

188201 wrote: post #31
jabiko wrote: post #9

Even though we use Grafana only internally and there would be no problem with AGPLv3 in theory I see big meetings with legal coming up which might result in us not being able to use it anymore. I could image that its the same with other corporations. In the end that might hurt the popularity of Grafana quite a lot.

I think that's misunderstanding of AGPL. For internal use, AGPL does not require to share the proprietary part. If a company develop an proprietary UI and use Loki as backend, this is not serving Loki directly to customer, so that does not require company to release their code. It is similar to GPL. Dynamic linking to a GPL software does not require the developer releasing their code. Only provider serving Loki insta…

But think about it. Anyone that use AGPLv3 software can demand the AGPLv3 license, including employees and contractors. Once they got it, they can freely publish it to the public because it's AGPLv3. Forcing NDA to not leak it to the public doesn't work here because it violate AGPLv3 license thus copyright infringement.

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

#406

Post by ec109685 »

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…

Don’t they have a license to your work and they can do however they please with it? E.g. sell it to X and Y for whatever they want and X and Y have no obligations to ever release anything back?

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

#407

Post by throwaway2037 »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #376
sneak wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very simplistic and, I think inaccurate view of the matter. My customers, for example, to whom I provide service, are not infringed upon in any way because I use private forks of GPL software in the provision of my services.

> My customers, for example, to whom I provide service, are not infringed upon in any way The issue is that I—and, more importantly, your customers—must simply take your word for it, since we're unable to confirm or deny it for ourselves if you don't make the source available. When dealing with large corporations, taking such statements at face value is pretty foolish.

This is an interesting point. The original question was what if my database was AGPL, and it's source code was modified. If this database was used as part of a public (cloud-based) web-app, how could end users ever know there is a custom database? You are right: It seems likely that less ethical orgs would just lie and say they use the database unmodified. Thus avoiding the obligation to publish their database modifications as required by AGPL.

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

#408

Post by ec109685 »

judofyr wrote: post #130
asim wrote: post #3

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…

> 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. […] It's a very measured and thoughtful way to ensure the long term progress and continuity of these projects. Ahem: Grafana Labs Brings In $50M Series B For Open-Source Developer Platform: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/grafana-labs-brings-in-50m-... I compl…

Not remain viable. To maximize shareholder value. Nothing is arguing it wouldn’t be a tidy little business with the previous license.

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

#409

Post by toddpersen »

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=2bb7...

Before there was any code, there was a permissive license. If the choice had been made 8 years ago to make Kibana less-permissively licensed, it's very likely Grafana wouldn't exist right now.

And for historical fun, here's the first commit from Torkel after the fork from Kibana v3: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/commit/50e42c8bdd2099552d...

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

#410

Post by acranox »

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…

This article tries to answer that question. https://medium.com/swlh/understanding-the-agpl-the-most-misu...
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