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Comment by hitekker | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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But the point is that they acknowledge that they forked Kibana and why. It’s no different than if someone forks Apache code to form a proprietary software company. The permissive license contributed to the success of many companies. They further acknowledge that Apache based Grafana can be forked too, but they’re betting on themselves to continue to succeed long term by focusing on good software, branding and community. The GP’s point seemed to indicate that “no one” acknowledged the Kibana origins when in fact Grafana themselves have.

You're right - I hadn't seen that in the Q&A, so I appreciate you pointing it out.

Listen, at the end of the day, it's their legal right to choose the licensing strategy that they think is right for their business, shareholders, employees, customers, peace of mind, etc. I feel like asking if it's hypocritical is a bit of a straw man, though. It's not hypocritical per se - I just feel that it's a bit disingenuous to say "hey, we have this large, successful business to protect" without also openly acknowledging that it may never have existed without the tailwinds of an era where the open source community embraced permissive licenses. Simply dismissing the question as "hypothetical" is what I take issue with.

Also, I see your shiny, new account and feel it's likely that you are really just here to defend Grafana. I get it. I don't think this change is a bad idea, necessarily. I just want some of these licensing shenanigans to be more brutally honest.

> 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.

Why's that? If Kibana had been AGPL and Grafana had been AGPL from day 1, how would the growth and survival of Grafana have been any different?

Many companies ban agpl code, this came from legal and is taken seriously by business. Ops guy says it won't touch anything else, business says don care no.

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 with the requirements of AGPL in place?

It seems naive to argue that none of those would have been impacted by a more restrictive license.

Are you sure you're not asking questions whose answer depends on one's ideological pre-disposition?

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. ;)

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