[sciurus]

It looks like this is a fork of Cortex driven by the maintainers employed by Grafana Labs, done so they can change the license to one that will prevent cloud providers like Amazon from offering it without contributing changes back.

This is interesting, since Amazon offers both hosted Grafana and Cortex today. I was under the impression Amazon and Grafana Labs were successfully collaborating (unlike e.g. AWS and Elastic), but seems like that's not the case.

[WraithM]

Does AWS provide managed Cortex? Is that just a part of the AWS managed prometheus thing?

[sciurus]

Yes, Amazon's managed Prometheus is based on Cortex. See the first question at https://aws.amazon.com/prometheus/faqs/

[_msw_]

Disclosure: I work for AWS, but I don't work on the Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. I have my own very long held opinions about Free and Open Source software, and I am only speaking for myself.

To me, the AGPLv3 license isn't about forcing software users to "give changes back" to a project. It is about giving the permissions to users of software that are necessary for Software Freedom [1] when they access a program over a network. In practice, that means that changes often flow "upstream" to copyleft licensed programs one way or another. But it was never about obligating changes to be "given back" to upstream. In my personal opinion, you should be "free to fork" Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Indeed, the Grafana folks seem to have decided to do that with Grafana Mimir.

Personally, I hope that they accept contributions under the AGPLv3 license, and hold themselves to the same obligations that others are held to with regard to providing corresponding source code of derivative works when it is made available to users over a network. In my personal opinion, too often companies use a contributor agreement that excuses them from those obligations, and also allows them to sell the software to others under licenses that do not carry copyleft obligations. See [2] for a blog post that goes into some detail about this.

If you look at the Coretex project MAINTAINERS file [3], you will see that there are two folks listed that currently work at AWS, but no other company other than Grafana Labs today. I would love to see more diversity in maintainers for a project like this, as I think too many maintainers from any one company isn't the best for long term project sustainability.

I think if you look at the Cortex Community Meeting minutes [4], you can see that AWS folks are regularly "showing up" in healthy numbers, and working collaboratively with anyone who accepts the open invitation to participate. There have been some pretty big improvements to Coretex that have merged lately, like some of the work on parallel compaction [5, 6].

TL;DR, I think it is easy to jump to some conclusions about how things are going in a FOSS project that don't hold water if you do some cursory exploration. I think best way to know what's going on in a project is to get involved!

--

[1] the rights needed to: run the program for any purpose; to study how the program works, and modify it; to redistribute copies; to distribute copies of modified versions to others

[2] https://meshedinsights.com/2021/06/14/legally-ignoring-the-l...

[3] https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex/blob/master/MAINTAIN...

[4] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1shtXSAqp3t7fiC-9uZcKkq3m...

[5] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/scaling-cortex-with-...

[6] https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex/pull/4624

[justincormack]

Their other AGPL projects all have a CLA and they state you can buy them as part of Grafana Enterprise without the AGPL license https://grafana.com/blog/2022/03/30/qa-with-our-ceo-about-gr... so they are not offering symmetric terms to themselves.

[_msw_]

Indeed. I was only saying what I would _like_ to see...