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Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

Related, have there been any 'truly open-source' forks of Grafana since their license change? Or does anyone know of good Grafana alternatives from FOSS devs in general? My default right now is to just use Prometheus itself, but I miss some of the dashboard functionality etc. from Grafana.

Grafana's license change to AGPLv3 (I suspect to drive their enterprise sales), combined with an experience I had reporting security vulnerabilities, combined with seeing changes like this[1] not get integrated has left a bad taste in my mouth.

[1] https://github.com/grafana/grafana/pull/6627

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AGPLv3 is a completely valid choice for an open source license, and (not that it was necessarily questioned, but since critique of pushing enterprise sales comes up,) having a split open source/enterprise license structure is not particularly egregious and definitely not new. Some people definitely don't like it, but even Richard Stallman is generally approving of this model[1]. It's hard to find someone more ideologically-oriented towards the success and proliferation of free and open source software, though that obviously doesn't mean everyone agrees.

I'm not saying, FWIW, that I think AGPL is "good", but it is at least a perfectly valid open source license. I'm well aware of the criticisms of it in general. But if you're going to relicense an open source project to "defend" it against abuse, AGPL is probably the most difficult to find any objection to. It literally exists for that reason.

I don't necessarily think that Grafana is the greatest company ever or anything, but I think these gripes are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. (Well, the security issue might be a bit more serious, but without context I can't judge that one.)

[1]: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions

To be fair, AGPLv3 is a very valid open source licence.

Now, poor and bad behaviour from the prom maintainers is a very fertile subject. If you want to see some real spicy threads check out the one where people raised that Prom’s calculation of rate is incorrect, or the thread where people asked for prom to interpolate secrets into its config from env cars - like every other bit of common cloud-adjacent software.

Both times prom devs behaved pretty poorly and left really bad taste in my mouth. Victoria Metrics seems like a much better replacement.

The AGPL is probably the best option for a FOSS license. Why do you consider it "not truly open-source"?

AGPL prevents from wide product adoption, since corporate lawyers caution against relying on AGPL products because it is easy to violate the license terms and being sued after that.

It's not possible to sell non-FOSS modifications to AGPL-licensed software. I think that's intended. It's not antithetical to Open Source, quite the opposite in fact.

Good. Doesn't prevent it from using (not selling) in your company.

Yeah, but lawyers (and companies where these lawyers work) are afraid of licenses with unclear or vague terms such as GPL, LGPL, AGPL, BSL, etc. They prefer to deal with software licensed under clear and concise open-source licenses such as Apache2, MIT and BSD.

If lawyers micro-manage what you use for your internal tooling you have lost. You can't work anymore.

If lawyers are afraid of licenses they should change their profession.

Do those companies really care about open-source, or just about code they can freely integrate into their proprietary products?

Companies care about open source if it helps them increasing their revenue:

- If they use open source code in their commercial products, then they care about the ability to freely use the code without legal consequences.

- If they develop open source product, then they care about increasing the adoption rate of the product.

In both cases truly open source licences such as Apache2, BSD and MIT, work the best. Copyleft licences with some arbitrary restrictions on code use prevent from wide adoption of the licensed project.

There is only a single well-known exception - Linux kernel with GPL v2 license. Commercial companies have to figure out how to use Linux kernel in their commercial products because there is no good alternative.

Maybe I should start insisting on the term "FOSS".

Pushover licenses ("truly open source") enable the exploitation of FOSS developers in the name of easy profit for the people building proprietary software around it, while Copyleft licenses ensure that this does not happen, granting each user the essential freedoms. The restrictions are not arbitrary, they exist precisely to ensure that these freedoms cannot be taken away from anyone. If this hinders widespread adoption by companies, it just means that those companies didn't plan on respecting the essential freedoms.

Freedom is the ability to use the open source code without any restrictions. Copyleft licences restrict the freedom. These licences sound good in theory (let's prevent from unpaid use of the code in proprietary products!), but they work not so good in practice (why bothering with legal headache related to copyleft-licensed code if it is easier to use BSD-licensed code?). This prevents from wide adoption of copyleft-licensed products.

You're misinterpreting it. Integrating FOSS code into a proprietary product is what restricts the user's freedom. Copyleft licenses prevent this restriction. And yes, indeed, why bother working for freedom if it's easier to not have freedom?

See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.en.html

> Integrating FOSS code into a proprietary product is what restricts the user's freedom. Copyleft licenses prevent this restriction.

This is like saying "black is white".

Users are free to use any products - open source and proprietary. They don't care about licenses most of the time - they prefer the product with better usability. Copyleft licenses prevent from creating proprietary product with better usability on top of open-source product with mediocre usability. E.g. copyleft licenses restrict users' freedom to use the best product - they force users dealing with the mediocre product.

> This is like saying "black is white".

Take a simpler example. If you have the freedom to imprison me for no reason, you can take away my (literal) freedom. Now you are free, but I am not. Because of this imbalance, the freedom to arbitrarily imprison people is an unreasonable one. Everyone should have as much freedom as possible, and everyone should have the same "amount" of freedom, if you will, so restricting others is out of scope. It's not just about your own freedom, don't be selfish! And besides, what ethically good person would want to lock people up for no reason?

When you are creating proprietary software, you are asking your users to let them be oppressed by you. You are asking them to give in to potential surveillance, planned obsolescence, manipulation, extortion and a variety of other injustices. And when you charge a price for your proprietary application, you are asking your users to pay for this mistreatment. What value does "the best product" really have, when you pay for it with your wallet and your freedom?

Your antique monetization scheme does not align with the values of Free Software. Should you restrict your users' freedom, or fix your monetization scheme?

> combined with them not being a good steward for changes like this[1] left a bad taste in my mouth.

What they did wrong with this PR? It seems eventually they realized the scope was much bigger, requiring changes on both the frontend and backend, and asked potential contributors to reach out if they're interested in contributing that particular feature (saying between the lines that they themselves don't have a use, but they won't reject a PR).

Seems like they didn't need it themselves, and asked the community to contribute it if someone really wanted it, but no one has stepped up since then.

I think the word is rather use is copyleft! Agpl is fully open source in its truest sense! It’s so open that it ensures it always stays open!

The FOSS alternative to Grafana is Grafana, which is FOSS. More FOSS than it was before, actually.

can y explain the problem with that github pull request? I did not get it

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