Someone has to pay to keep the lights so data-viz outfit Grafana switches licence regime to AGPLv3

Data visualisation biz Grafana is switching its licence model from Apache 2.0 to the Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3. The decision, announced this morning by CEO and co-founder Raj Dutt, was made as the company continues balancing the "value creation" of its open-source community and the "value capture" of monetisation …

[karlkarl]

I wish GPLv3 had the courage to include Affero GPL by default.

I like the idea behind the GPL but in some ways I wonder if it is contributing towards the horrible trend of moving everything into the cloud.

I.e if I was a company who wanted to benefit from open-source but not have my own code made public, just providing a web service solves this problem.

I can stomach proprietary software, however I simply will not engage with the cloud or other DRM. So GPL is actually working a little bit against me even though in principle I think its a good thing.

If every GPL project was magically turned into BSD / MIT, perhaps we wouldn't even have half the number of cloud services these days. Or maybe I am just dreaming of a better world ;)

[Crypto Monad]

Vendors don't choose to provide cloud services because of licences. Ask yourself why Microsoft pushes Office 365 so heavily over the on-prem products, when they own the licences anyway.

Vendors provide cloud services:

- to get a recurring revenue stream

- to control upgrades and bugfix releases

- to simplify support processes

- because many customers don't want to manage servers any more

- ... etc

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed...

Because backups are hard and businesses assume cloud = backup.

[unimaginative]

Until they find it is not and then hire one of those cloud services that backup your cloudy stuff.

Then they need to hire someone to run the increasing number of cloud services.

Then they need to hire a "finops" person to track what they are spending on cloud services and try to control it. Yes, finops is really a thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate the "cloud" as much as anybody, but non-free software licenses like BSD/MIT are certainly not the answer.

The AGPL is a much better choice, since it forces software running "in the cloud" (on somebody else's computer) to remain free. A company looking to profit from "open-source" but not wanting to contribute back to the community should get stuffed, they can either pay for completely proprietary software or open their own code.

The "cloud" is companies looking for a continuing revenue stream. That would happen no matter what the software license was. We'd all benefit if the garbage BSD/MIT license magically turned into the AGPL

[jtaylor]

non-free software licenses like BSD/MIT

In what way are the BSD and MIT licenses not free?

https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause

https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Define freedom

Depends on what you mean by freedom... BSD/MIT give freedom to developers (e.g. no obligation to ship the source, just don't claim you wrote it), GPL gives freedom to users (must allow users to compile / fix your product).

[jtaylor]

Re: Define freedom

Depends on what you mean by freedom... BSD/MIT give freedom to developers (e.g. no obligation to ship the source, just don't claim you wrote it), GPL gives freedom to users (must allow users to compile / fix your product).

I never considered that. Yes, I guess the GPL does give consumers more...well, I'd call them "rights." If we say "freedom," what about Public Domain (unrestricted use)? Would that be even less free?

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Define freedom

That's just part of the politics of the GPL: strings are strings and one of the intended side effects of the GPL is to force the licence onto other software if it makes use of GPL code.

[katrinab]

There are non-free variants of FreeBSD, such as PlayStationOS and MacOS. That wouldn't be possible with the GPL.

[Anonymous Coward]

So to put it another way: BSD lets you do more things with software than GPL does.

And yes, that includes building it into a proprietary product, making money from that product, and keeping your modified source for that product secret.

The fact that MacOS and PlayStationOS exist (and you can't build them yourself), doesn't reduce your freedom to do what you like with FreeBSD - including creating other proprietary platforms.

From the end-users point of view: Apple and Sony could have written their own OS from scratch. If they had, the user would have no more rights than they have today.

From the FreeBSD project's point of view: having good code widely deployed is for the common good.

[unimaginative]

Really? What is now called MacOS was written by Next as NextStep. Did Next have the resources to write an OS from scratch.

Apple's attempt to write a MacOS successor also failed.

[Aitor 1]

Affero

I would rather deal with propietary sw.

[unimaginative]

Re: Affero

That is the point of it. If you want to hide the fact you are using open source code, or redistribute it in closed form, you can buy an "enterprise" license or a hosted service.

[sabroni]

Paying to keep the lights

That's a nasty electricity contract they've got, actually removing the lights rather than than just turning the electricity supply off.