Some companies have no AGPL policy.
> a Linux Foundation project that was founded in 2015 to help advance container technology[1] and align the tech industry around its evolution.
> It was announced alongside Kubernetes 1.0, an open source container cluster manager, which was contributed to the Linux Foundation by Google as a seed technology. Founding members include Google, CoreOS, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Twitter, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, IBM, Docker, Univa, and VMware
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Native_Computing_Foundat...
I haven't read the details, or ever seen this policy before (I'm new to both projects) but it was summarized by one of our counterparts at the Linux Foundation here:
https://twitter.com/cra/status/1384859663615864833
Tl;dr: licenses must be approved for use, and the CNCF has this list of allowed licenses, AGPL is not on it. The CNCF is in the business of distributing permissively-licensed software is the short version I guess. I don't understand, I don't work on the legal side, I am a dev and I support end users.
It seems if your Apache 2.0 licensed project needs to modify and distribute as modified an AGPL project, (which for Grafana it seems likely we will need to do at some point, the Linkerd project already has needed to do this if I understood correctly) then you cannot distribute them together, or something about this becomes much more complicated. Chris says they are going to try to work something out, but when a component has made a decision to re-license with a restrictive-copyleft license such as AGPL,
I don't know what there is that can be done to fix it. I hope they come up with something.
Maybe the CNCF adopts AGPL too, (which would mean that then all those "viral-GPL" FUD-spreaders will have been right...) that seems counter-productive if that is the outcome. (So I hope they come up with something else than that!)
Everyone is within their own rights to do whatever they want with the output of their own labor, I just wanted to help dispel the notion that only exploitative companies are affected by this change.
If the "why" rather than the mechanical/legal "what" is what you're after, this is the CNCF position paper on the topic: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends-aslv2/
> Proponents of copyleft licenses have argued that these licenses prevent companies from exploiting open source projects by building proprietary products on top of them. Instead, we have found that successful projects can help companies’ products be successful and that the resulting profits can be fed back into those projects by having the companies employ many of the key developers, creating a positive feedback loop.