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

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

#571

Post by toddpersen » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 3:24 AM UTC

pauldix wrote: post #565

toddpersen wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Oh, hey! Nice to have at least one person here that isn’t going to jump on the AGPL bandwagon. ;)

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

#572

Post by throwaway2037 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 6:20 AM UTC

josephcsible wrote: post #420

throwaway2037 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this is a fascinating answer. I really like your thought experiment with LibreOffice. Imagine something even more nefarious: The whole LibreOffice team "quits" to start a company that does exactly the above. After building a large user base on their web-only version, they begin to charge for premium features. All while never distributing the GPL code ever again. To be clear to all readers: This is only a thought…

The source for compiled JavaScript or WASM needs to be provided even with just the GPL rather than the AGPL. The loophole in the GPL only applies if the code is actually running on someone else's server and not the user's client.

Great point. To travel deeper down this rabbit hole: We might need something like "Citrix Remote Desktop" in a browser. Basically: Only sent graphical diffs over the wire. Then, browser is only painting pixels, not running the app. Everything else is computed remotely. Horrible scenario, but sadly might pass muster vis-a-vis A/GPL!

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

#573

Post by guiriduro » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 9:09 AM UTC

hakre wrote: post #566

guiriduro wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They amount to the same thing. A git repo is an historical document. All commits (and forks) up to the one changing to the new license "going forward" are available under the original license.

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

#574

Post by ltbarcly3 » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

retzkek wrote: post #150

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #47

I remember when the AGPL was being talked about in around 2008 or so, and thinking it was ludicrous. Now I wonder if it's too lenient. AWS is just rebranding open source products and selling access for infinite markups while killing the open economy that created them. Maybe what we need is a 'no AWS' license, think Apache License but with a clause that says no corporation with more than $50B in revenue can resell it.

I mean, good for them? If they're "just rebranding and selling access for infinite markup" then surely the only people who would pay them are either too lazy or too busy to host it themselves, or too rich to care? Would you prefer that people/companies that fall into these categories be forced to go through some _other_ reseller (who is just adding their own markup on top of the cloud hosting costs) instead of gettin…

No, that's not the issue. They have a marketplace where ElasticSearch can be sold as SaaS. However, when there is something open source being offered on that marketplace, they co-opt it, give it AWS branding, and sell it themselves. They also own the infrastructure that both their own offering and the 3rd party SaaS offering is hosted on. Lets say they charge $1.00 / unit for EC2. They can charge $1.00 / unit for the 3rd party SaaS to run their service, and $1.00 / unit for their own offering which is basically EC2 + SaaS, so there is literally no way for the 3rd party to be price competitive, and meanwhile their own SaaS offering is blasted into the AWS interface everywhere, while the 3rd party offering has to be searched for and found. So they take the development work of that 3rd party and use their lock in and ability to steer customers to shut out the 3rd party, while taking all their work and selling it themselves at a price that the 3rd party can't possibly match (and not because of efficiency, because they'll just refuse to make a deal with the 3rd party to give an EC2 discount that they give all their other large customers if it would mean the 3rd party can then be price competitive with a SaaS offering that would compete with one of their own).

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

#575

Post by p_l » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

tremon wrote: post #520

p_l wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The postgresql driver might be considered derivative work, and thus required to be AGPL as well, because Postgres does not talk some standard protocol that exists outside of it.

But one can modify Postgres without changing the wire protocol, so the driver may be the plain, original one without custom modifications. The AGPL doesn't mandate that the protocol must be ratified by some standards body, only that a "Standard Interface [exists] for which an implementation is available to the public in source code form".

The driver would be derived work of Postgres, thus AGPL, and already problematic in use because of that.

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

#576

Post by dkarras » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 11:48 PM UTC

__david__ wrote: post #569

dkarras wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh, that is a bit dishonest argument. "I want to keep distributing, and I want to keep using this code" are the immutable assumptions of my argument. My point is, with those assumptions in place, there is no way to NOT propagate GPL in the entirety of the work - was my point. That is OK since GPL is intentionally made that way. Take it or leave it deal. No one is entitled to anything, if people want to distribute their work as GPL, that is up to them to decide after all. I am only discussing the virality aspect of it here as a separate fact.

And how does immediately stoping distribution help, legally? If I have already distributed the binary, the recipients are already entitled to the entire sources, no? Or does GPL have a "I have learned my lesson" clause?

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

#577

Post by gibba999 » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

akulkarni wrote: post #172

gibba999 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And ergo, I'd never use TimescaleDB. It's not less restrictive in any objective sense; it has different restrictions. It's apparently less restrictive to you, but it's much more restrictive to me. Why not toss in an AGPL license option? You wouldn't be discounted off-the-bat by folks like me. I build open source. Timescale is not open source. Timescale won't mix with GPL code. I use plenty of GPL code. GPL/AGPL are k…

We do offer an Apache 2 only binary of TimescaleDB which includes our open source core (and excludes the Timescale Licensed features). In fact, many companies (Azure, Digital Ocean, Ali Baba, etc) offer this Apache 2 version to their customers.

I'll mention I hate this style of conversation. You call up a vendor, and ask about X. They switch to talking point Y, without ever addressing the point.

It's ubiquitous ("it's me, not you"), but I hate it.

I'd much rather get a straight "no."

To answer the non-answer: I don't want a crippled version of the product with features held back for paying customers. I don't know which other features will be held back in the future, or what the evolution of the system will be. My expectation is that at some point, I'll need e.g. features to comply with a law like GDPR, and some critical feature may be withheld in an attempt to monetize me.

When that happens, I end up in limbo.

With a half-open-source project, what do you do? Do you fork the system and build the feature yourself? It will never move into mainstream since it undermines your revenue source. Do you maintain a fork? No one will use your fork over mainstream and you have competing communities. Etc.

Having built systems which have been used and maintained for decades, those sorts of considerations matter much more for picking a long-term viable solution than which technology happens to be ahead this year. I'm not saying you're going to burn me (and usually by the time this happens, you've been acquired by Oracle like Java, went bankrupt and got picked up by vultures, like SCO, hired a massive number of mediocre people, like Google), but if you make a dozen decisions like this, someone WILL burn you, and that WILL cost you more than the other 11 decisions combined.

Make it easy on customers like me.

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

#578

Post by dec0dedab0de » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 9:41 PM UTC

jblwps wrote: post #563

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.

I didn't see your reply until just now, but the AGPL does not require you to redistribute source code to network users if it is not modified. The following stack exchange question has quotes from the fsf

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/650/do-i-have...