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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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. ;)

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.

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