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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

#441

Post by josephcsible »

open0 wrote: post #435
rakoo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 line between user and developer is blurry, especially in the context of software that exposes its configuration entirely as some part of its core function. > The freedom of users is more important than the freedom of developers. What exactly is this "freedom" that users are benefiting from? Is this the part where we invoke some negative right? That's called "control".

You have it backwards. The "control" you're speaking of is actually the thing that the AGPL withholds, so if you care about users having freedom but not control, then it's exactly what you want.

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

#442

Post by varajelle »

leeoniya wrote: post #421
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 wonder how much of that original Kibana code remains today (my guess is not very much), and if it were originally AGPL, would a completely rewritten codebase still be subject to it?

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.

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

#444

Post by jandrewrogers »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #403
watermelon0 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Postgres is designed to be modified and is highly extensible. Many companies add features or capabilities that are not native to Postgres. Some things you can do using extension interfaces (linking in shared libraries) and others require modifying the source. It can get a bit blurry, it really depends on what you are trying to do.

It is not that uncommon to mod Postgres to do something it can’t do out of the box. I’ve been paid to do it many times for companies that use Postgres to make it do just a bit more. This is a pretty valuable and unique property of Postgres; it has many fundamental limitations but a lot of small limitations can be coded around if you are handy with C.

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

#445

Post by lmm »

hnick wrote: post #426
zmmmmm wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to split hairs the other answers don't: you specify you have modified Postgres. My answer is, it entirely depends if your application is considered a "derivative work" of Postgres. This hinges on a couple of things: - does your application directly include AGPL postgres code in any form (headers, binary, etc etc) to its own source or its own runtime process? - keep in mind, in answering the above, that your…

Doesn't it also depend to some degree on how much code sits between the user and AGPL code? IIRC AGPL was created to bypass a thin wrapper frontend type situation. I make a website that takes PDFs, it lets users extract pages. In the backend I'm just running a modified Ghostscript command line and sending back what it makes. From my discussions with other people, this type of direct coupling automation is what is int…

It depends on whether a court considers it to legally be a derivative work or not. Some (but not all) circuits apply the "Abstraction, Filtration, Comparison Test", under which thin wrappers should make no difference. Other courts might have their own ways of deciding. The whole area is murky and untested, mainly because companies haven't really hammered out the cases in court.

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

#446

Post by lmm »

darkwater wrote: post #223
watermelon0 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you need to release as GPL the code of a program runnning on GNU/Linux? The answer is no. The same applies to software interacting with AGPL Postgres using the postgre protocol. If you are AWS and gives access to customers to modified versions of AGPL Postgresql you AWS must release your patches over Postgresql. IANAL and all that jazz, also I'm not that sure about the typical cloud vendor secret sauce that contro…

> Do you need to release as GPL the code of a program runnning on GNU/Linux? The answer is no.

Only because Linux (and perhaps more relevantly glibc) specifically exempts the relevant protocols from the GPL.

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

#447

Post by lmm »

Paul-ish wrote: post #365
LukeShu wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand on that, you have to offer to provide the source to "all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network". If you're using Grafana for monitoring your SaaSS app, then your users aren't interacting with Grafana, so you're fine.

If your SaaSS app surfaces a few small things from Grafana to the user, do you only have to open source the glue code, or the entire SaaSS application?

The entire application, to the extent that it's a single work under copyright law. If your app is a "mere aggregation" of e.g. grafana administration and other-service-administration components then maybe not.

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

#448

Post by hitekker »

CaptainOSS wrote: post #438
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…

they talk about Kibana in their Q&A: https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relic...

Relevant section copypasted below:

> If Kibana had been an AGPL project, would Grafana even exist? Are we being hypocritical?

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

> This is of course a hypothetical question, so it’s difficult to determine how that would have affected subsequent business decisions the company might have made.

> Making business decisions to increase the likelihood of commercial success of our company while also supporting the health of our thriving Grafana community on the basis of new information and an evolving situation is not hypocritical.

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.

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

#449

Post by lmm »

sneak wrote: post #325
LambdaComplex wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You believe in freedom for who, exactly? Freedom for the users of software? Or freedom for corporations who benefit from denying access to the source code of that software? The Free Software Foundation exists to protect the former at the expense of the latter.

You are dragging anti-corporate ideology into a very simple matter. Corporations are sometimes users, and individual people often benefit from denying access to the source code of software that is used to provide a service . Providing a service is fundamentally different from providing software.

There's nothing anti-corporate about it. The AGPL is motivated by the same thing that motivated the original GPL: making sure that users have access to fix bugs in the software they're using, like in the printer driver anecdote.

The AGPL doesn't require you to provide the source for software that you're using to provide a service - only the source for software where the software is the service. A bug in software I use is equally annoying when I'm using that software over a network connection as it is when I'm using it on my local machine.

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

#450

Post by pabs3 »

LukeShu wrote: post #321
kevincox wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to be shared to the user under the same license. So any user could publish the changes publicly.

Sure, but there might be out-of-band reasons for users to not do that. For instance, grsecurity will sell you a security-hardening-patched Linux kernel. You, as the user/customer, have the right to take those GPL patches, and share them publicly. But if you do so, grsecurity will blacklist you as a customer, and you won't be able to get any more patches from them.

IIRC one of grsec's customers did already leak their patches, I can't find the Twitter thread or other discussions about it any more though.
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