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Comment by jabiko | Hacker News Reader

> Your first post is about the one time and perpetual operational overhead associated with operating under the prior FOSS license

My first post is about the fact that even though the planned use case would be 100% compliant to the AGPLv3 license the fear that is associated with that license could prevent such use.

> That makes zero business sense

Purchasing a license in that case while not strictly necessary might be seen as an insurance. So that makes business sense.

In the end though I highly doubt that's whats going to happen. The most likely outcome is that we just get told to get rid of Grafana and use something else.

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> In the end though I highly doubt that's whats going to happen. The most likely outcome is that we just get told to get rid of Grafana and use something else.

Whatever you replace it with will have the same licensing overhead. Again, this makes no sense.

If you said we can’t afford to pay for it, fine. But you explicitly said you don’t think cost is an issue.

Maybe I’m making the wrong inference, but it sounds like you’re afraid your higher ups just don’t want to have any restrictions placed on whatever business need it is that Grafana is filling for you. If I haven’t misunderstood that fear, then I regret to say that any software product other than one you build and maintain yourselves will come with some restrictions or the possibility of future restrictions.

When I say this makes no business sense, that’s what I’m trying to get at: other than (potentially) licensing cost, any Grafana substitute will come with the same issues, plus switching costs. So unless there is a FOSS product that provides a better solution to your problem, by definition switching will be more costly than maintaining status quo.

Or am I missing the point?

I think you’re getting the essential facts but drawing a conclusion that is still wrong, at least for some people/companies.

“What can I do with Grafana in my business under GPL?” is much more clearly defined than the same question changing only the last word to AGPL. Alternatives available under Apache v2 or other non-copyleft licenses are also clear. For GPL, all I need to be careful to avoid doing is distributing the software and I’m in a well-understood situation.

It’s this closing off of futures unknown but possible that is markedly worse under AGPL. Anything that you’re doing today that could apply externally as well seems to be an area where a decision to continue to follow Grafana tip could bite you. And not updating could also bite you. Grafana will lose contributors and users over this. All of that I’m sure Grafana considered and made the best choice for Grafana.

Losing users and contributors, sure.

Losing users who would otherwise be willing to pay for a commercial license (as the OP said they are) that could be negotiated to explicitly cover whatever future use case they’re concerned about? That makes no sense.

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