Udviklerne af data visualiseringsplatformen Grafana har annonceret overgangen til AGPLv3 licensen i stedet for den tidligere anvendte Apache 2.0 licens. En tilsvarende ændring af licensen er blevet foretaget for log aggregationssystemet Loki og det distribuerede sporingsbackend Tempo. Plugins, agenter og nogle biblioteker vil fortsat blive leveret under Apache 2.0 licensen.
Interessant nok bemærker nogle brugere, at en af årsagerne til Grafanas succes, i begyndelsen forsøgte at optimere grænsefladen til det allerede eksisterende produkt Kibana til visualisering af tidsændrende data og slippe for afhængigheden af Elasticsearch-lageret, var valget af en mere tilladende kode licens. Over tid blev Grafana Labs dannet af Grafanas udviklere, som begyndte at promovere kommercielle produkter som den cloud-baserede Grafana Cloud og den kommercielle løsning Grafana Enterprise Stack.
Beslutningen om at ændre licens blev truffet for at forblive flydende og klare konkurrencen fra leverandører, der ikke deltager i udviklingen, men bruger modificerede versioner af Grafana i deres produkter. I modsætning til de drastiske foranstaltninger truffet af projekter som ElasticSearch, Redis, MongoDB, Timescale og Cockroach, der er gået over til en licens, der ikke er open source, har Grafana Labs forsøgt at træffe en beslutning, der balancerer mellem samfundets og forretningsinteresser. Overgangen til AGPLv3 er ifølge Grafana Labs den optimale løsning: på den ene side opfylder AGPLv3 kriterierne for frie og åbne licenser, og på den anden side forhindrer den parasitering på åbne projekter.
For those who use unmodified versions of Grafana in their services or publish the code of changes (for example, Red Hat Openshift and Cloud Foundry), the license change will not affect them. The change will also not impact Amazon, which provides the cloud product Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG), as this company is a strategic partner in development and offers many services to the project. Companies with corporate policies prohibiting the use of the AGPL license can continue to use older releases under the Apache license, for which updates to fix vulnerabilities are planned. Another option is to use the proprietary Enterprise edition of Grafana, which can be used for free if additional paid features are not activated through the purchase of a key.
It should be noted that a feature of the AGPLv3 license is the introduction of additional restrictions for applications that provide the operation of network services. When using AGPL components in the operation of a service, the developer is required to provide the user with the source code of all changes made to these components, even if the underlying software is not distributed and is used exclusively within the internal infrastructure to organize the service's operation. The AGPLv3 license is compatible only with GPLv3, which leads to a licensing conflict with applications supplied under the GPLv2 license. For example, providing a library under AGPLv3 requires all applications using this library to distribute their code under either the AGPLv3 or GPLv3 licenses, which is why some Grafana libraries remain under the Apache 2.0 license.
In addition to the license change, the Grafana project has been transitioned to a new agreement with developers (CLA), which defines the transfer of property rights to the code, allowing Grafana Labs to change the license without agreeing with all participants in the development. The old agreement based on the Harmony Contributor Agreement has been replaced with an agreement based on the document signed by the participants of the Apache Foundation. This new agreement is stated to be clearer and more familiar to developers.
Kilde: opennet.ru
