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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

Okay, so they go out of their way to avoid answering how this actually affects people, so I'll ask here: If a company uses grafana internally, this should have no effect, right? And then the next step: If a company did offer grafana-based dashboards to customers but wasn't actually modifying grafana, what if anything does this do?

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They do say it:

> It’s important to note that this change does not prevent our users from using, modifying, or providing our open source software to others — provided, however, that under the AGPL license, users have to share source code if they are modifying it and making it available to others (either as a distribution or over a network). For distributors, AGPL has the same source code sharing requirements as GPL. Those conditions are designed to encourage third parties looking to modify the software to also contribute back to the project and the community.

It's still unclear to me if this also means things like custom dashboards, etc?

I read AGPL as "if you need to clone the Grafana Git repository, change code (even just one line), then you need to open source your changes". If you write code without having to modify Grafana's code itself, then you don't need to open source that.

I don't think it's what the license says. It says that if you are building a larger product that includes an AGPL part, then the whole product has to be AGPL. Even if you didn't change a single line of the AGPL code and just built "around" it.

Presumably - offering dashboards to users, would count as distribution to those users (internal or otherwise). Unmodified Grafana like has/will get a link to source code/license - that would likely cover you - although if Grafana goes away (or becomes closed source) - you might have to offer a copy of the source code on request?

They'd have to offer the source code to Grafana itself, which has basically negligible effect since it doesn't have anything of theirs in it.

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