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by ucosty 1462 days ago
Why is that unfortunate? Unless you're looking to make proprietary changes to Grafana Oncall and host it as a SAAS, it's the same as running any other GPL software.
1 comments

GPL and its variants are a no go where I work.
Must be quite the paranoid business, given even tier 1 banks here (in the UK) will happily run GPL software.
Is Linux verboten at work?
Probably not.

Linux usually gets a pass, because most times you're just deploying it and not mucking with source code.

But a lot of places (I've worked at more that do than don't) will have rules about GPL/AGPL for libraries/infra as a whole though. Often evaluated case-by-case, but it's rare I've seen a AGPL stuff get approved for usage.

I think some of it is not wanting to deal with the cost of vigilance; i.e. you can make sure that someone is using %thing% in a way that doesn't run afoul of AGPL right now, but does legal and upper management have confidence in that being true forever and always? Engineers are still human, and corporate management + legal teams tend to hate licensing folk tromping around.

This results in refusals ranging from "This is internal for now but we will open it up later" (a fair concern) to "Somebody is worried that exposing it over the VPN to contractors would count as making it public" (IDK, I'm not a lawyer.)

> Linux usually gets a pass, because most times you're just deploying it and not mucking with source code.

That would apply for most uses of software, wouldn't it?

> This results in refusals ranging from "This is internal for now but we will open it up later" (a fair concern) to "Somebody is worried that exposing it over the VPN to contractors would count as making it public" (IDK, I'm not a lawyer.)

I've encountered variations of this problem at places I have worked in. Education goes a long way to solving this, and this example of simple usage of (A)GPL software is easy enough to explain with examples.

Any Linux deploy is through RedHat but most local development here is using windows.

No idea why Linux gets a pass though.

Running a service with a GPL license is different than including their code in your projects, though. So while it may be a blanket ban, it may be worth it to clarify the scope of that ban.
Then the problem is in the company and not in the license.
To distribute I understand, but even just to use? Almost any desktop OS you run has GPL code somewhere in it
Almost any desktop OS? I may be wrong but I don't think Windows and macOS contain any GPL code.
Doesn't Windows 10 ship with WSL2 now? (which includes a full Linux kernel).

Apple still ships bash under GPLv2 on current macOS versions. Apple hates GPLv3, which is why they're trying to switch away from bash to zsh, but for the time being they're still shipping bash.