Open sourcing Pixie under Apache 2.0 license | Hacker News Reader

Open sourcing Pixie under Apache 2.0 license

blog.px.dev

108 pointsnserrino18 comments

Pixie maintainer / OP here. There's a lot of debate right now about licensing in the open source community. We made the call to go with Apache 2.0, and the lead of our project wrote in the post about why we made that decision.

And your CLA [1] does not reassign copyright, ensuring that you can't re-license later. Good on you!

[1]: https://github.com/pixie-labs/pixie/blob/main/CLA.md

The CLA gives permission to sublicense, but it isn't clear to me if this allows proprietary relicensing or not.

Lead maintainer of Pixie here.

Pixie will remain licensed under Apache 2.0. We are also working on moving Pixie over to the CNCF, to maintain this guarantee. This is being tracked here: https://github.com/cncf/toc/issues/651

In addition, we will likely move to a DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin). We are still trying to figure out the exact logistics, but this will allow commits to happen without signing a CLA.

It seems pretty good to me:

> We agree to license the Contribution only under the terms of the license or licenses which We are using on the Submission Date for the Material

Having just seen JBD from AWS mention now working on this project full time my complete assumption is that AWS will offer it as a service and this isn't possible if the licensing goes in the direction of blocking commercialisation. Since the startup that was building this got acquired by New Relic and Peter Fenton serves on that board I assume they're trying to attack this strategically in a different way. If that's not that case then this is otherwise a fairly naive effort or moreso about drive large scale adoption with open monetisation around it by everyone who wants to.

So, does that mean that AWS and New Relic can both offer a cloud version of Pixie. In that case, won't that be a bad deal for New Relic - since they acquired Pixie?

You can basically do anything with an Apache 2.0 licensed project and that's the point of this entire industry revolt. AWS is basically picking up prominent projects and hosting them for profit with little to no interaction with the entity that created it. Years of R&D and capital go into building these things from the ground up. For AWS at their scale to just lift it and contribute nothing back is a slap in the face. So yes with Pixie, similar possibilities, but New Relic is not stupid. They know this and are likely working directly with AWS on some sort of deal. I know Microsoft has done a better job in this avenue especially with the likes of Hashicorp. AWS actually has no choice but to do better given their lawsuit with Elastic.

I see. Can you shed more light on lawsuit between AWS & Elastic? I thought from a legal angle - AWS is completely fine to lift Elastic code and offer it as a service. What's the ground for a lawsuit here?

Presumably a completely different Pixie from the open-source one at https://sourceforge.net/projects/pixie/ ?

Correct, this project is unaffiliated with that one.

It's interesting to see these names which are used by several projects.

When I saw Pixie my first thought was the component of PIX[0] which installs itself on the Xbox.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/pix

Pixie gets a lot of use both within tech and outside of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixie_(disambiguation)

Yes, I also was confused because this Pixie [1] already is open source.

[1]: https://pixielang.org/

I thought of https://www.pixijs.com/

A little off topic, but if you are going with mostly managed services and you don't use k8s, what would you do to have decent tracing and observability? I'm currently using a combination of FaaS and cloud queues, for example.

Have you looked into instrumenting zipkin or opentracing? I instrumented zipkin in a Java project and found it generally pretty easy

You can check out DataDog or NewRelic - they do a decent job if you are looking for SaaS. If you are looking for open source products - checkout SigNoz (https://github.com/signoz/signoz)

Disclaimer: I am one of the maintainers of SigNoz

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