[slimsag]

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

[jchw]

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

[FridgeSeal]

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.

[max-privatevoid]

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

[valyala]

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.

[max-privatevoid]

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.

[gsich]

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

[valyala]

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.

[gsich]

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.

[max-privatevoid]

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

[valyala]

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.

[diggan]

> 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.

[getcrunk]

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!

[immibis]

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

[oriettaxx]

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