AGPL is nice and all but for contributors this does not really matter at all because of the CLAs.
I will never contribute to projects which reserve the right to relicense, e.g. take ownership over my contributions, however small or big they are. I think companies will do the same.
If they would remove the CLAs, they would signal to companies and contributors that they are serious in providing an open ecosystem, to which other people contribute willingly "for free". But currently they are not, likely because they fear competition.
but, i'm curious to understand your perspective here.
do you mean to say that you'd never contribute to an apache licensed project?
anything that is apache licensed can be relicensed by the project, even if there isn't a CLA
[note: am co-founder/ceo at grafana labs]
They are a much higher barrier to entry for a lot of contributors. No, they're not all the same, but they make it harder. Each CLA needs to be reviewed and approved by company lawyers. It's kinda like creating a brand new OSS license that way.
To use a concrete example, the Google open source CLA is awful. At my previous job our lawyers refused to sign off the Google CLA. One of my engineers wrote a patch that we wanted to get upstream. Since, it would be generally useful.
Basically, the patch could never be merged, because we had a legal stalemate between us and Google.
I would highly recommend using https://developercertificate.org/ instead. This is what we use for Prometheus. It's also used for GPL projects like Linux. It's simple, standard, and used widely.
AFAIK, it's up to copyright assignment for re-licensing.
For example, contributing to Prometheus assigns all copyright to "The Prometheus Authors". The DCO just attests that it's OK to do this.
So, I don't think there's anything for or against re-licensing in DCO, it's just out of scope.
Why?
Because CLAs make the sharing agreement asymmetrical. I want to provide my changes under exactly the same terms as you are providing your code. Additionally to the fact that CLAs are typically layed out in favor of the corporation and not of the contributor, they cause me to read that CLA, interact with it and most likely misinterpret it, because I'm a dev, not a/my lawyer. With common licenses I know what I'm getting and independent lawyers have created them, weighing the benefits of both sides.
Of course, the last argument is not really applicable if you depend on widely-known CLAs like the Apache CLA (I use widely-known because I have heard of it, but I really have no clue what it entails and have never signed one).
The issue of apache projects vs grafana is easy. I have never contributed to Apache projects and would hesitate to do so if I have to sign a CLA, but the issue is not as big because the License (AL2) of most of these projects already somewhat permits relicensing and AL2 is already a pretty weak license, because it is not infectious like the GPL family.
But allowing relicensing on an AGPL project means that if I change anything on your code then I have to publish it. If you change anything you don't have to publish your changes (because you can relicense). This is not contributing on equal terms, so I'm out.
Of course, one can also argue that you're doing much more work so the asymmetry is justified, but my work has not less value than yours and your benefit in this relationship already is determining where to go with the project.
That said, I am not a lawyer and my understanding of licenses and CLAs is very limited and could also be wrong. I'm not even accounting for different legal environments/jurisdictions here.
look at our actions since the inception of the company, as well as our "big tent" philosophy; i think they speak for ourselves.
we built a sustainable business over the course of 4 years, prior to raising a dollar of VC money. we raised VC money to go even faster.
most of our VC money goes to paying our employees.
most of our employees are engineers.
most of what our engineers do is open source.
if we don't build a sustainable business, who will develop the software?
the overwhelming majority of development on things like grafana, loki, tempo are done by grafana labs employees. plus, we are the main contributors behind other OSS projects that we didn't create and don't own (like prometheus and cortex).
[note: am co-founder/ceo at grafana labs]
Nope, but I kinda thought the whole idea behind open source is that no one company or group of companies/licensees gets privileged access to or control over the software, including any company that happens to have the same name as the piece of software.
I realize that “open source” and “free software” and other related labels mean many things to many people, and some people have very strong opinions about what does and doesn’t qualify, so I’m not trying to be prescriptive about what these terms “really” mean, but to me this is a pretty important almost self-evident part of it. If you want to sell proprietary software just do that!
That is not, at all, the idea behind open source. The idea behind open source is, basically, 'you are free to do whatever you like with the source code, as long as you credit us for our work and don't hold us responsible for any effects of using the work'. That's it. There is nothing about companies, corporations, licensees, who has control, who has what name, etc. All of that is irrelevant to open source at its core.
It's true that many people add on an open governance model (e.g. Rust) and mistakenly think that that is part of open source. It's not though.
That’s exactly what I said.
Certainly, there's things like the Linux Foundation that serve as places where projects can live without formal control by a single organization, but in practice, orgs that commit most of the code control things (for better or for worse - I'm not saying this is a good thing)
Well, yeah, that’s just the most obvious gut reaction everyone has when they first hear about open source software: Why in the world would anyone put work into software that’s free for everyone to use? My impression is that open source advocates have put tons of work into explaining why this can and does actually work and can result in software that’s better than proprietary alternatives.
For other's who are interested, here's a faq from grafana including a discussion about "Why AGPL and not SSPL?": https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relic...
As a commercial consumer of FOSS, AGPL has been troubling for me. As a non-commercial hacker, AGPL has been fine for me: GPL is fine here, and distribution as defined by SaaS or tarball is equivalent; I share back.
My opinions are that non-commercial FOSS projects probably shouldn't choose AGPL but that small-ish commercial FOSS projects (like Grafana, et al) probably should so that big commercial entities don't eat their lunch.
AGPL seemed like a tool that was mostly ahead of its time but is nice to have now.
Grafana Labs and all these other companies have recieved both value add and goodwill free marketing from open source contributions and communities, and I don't see these companies being at all interested in figuring out who/what they've gained value from, beyond the currently existing company, in order to make a profit and benefit the founders and shareholders.
I'm not against AGPL. I'm against the relicensing of software made in good faith against one model of OSS being discontinued and basically forked by the most prominent for-profit company that have hitherto received the significant benefits of both contributions and goodwill that being more freely open source brings.
By relicensing you've probably significantly reduced the number of companies willing to run future versions of your software, and the number of companies willing to build businesses off of extending it and offering that value add, while still potentially contributing changes upstream. You're going to slowly eat away at that good will and the number of people asking for your product internally, since fewer and fewer people will remember the benefit from their last gig.
I could be wrong here, only time will tell, but I honestly don't think this is a move that increases the long term sustainability of your business model. If anything, I think it's going to be detrimental in the long term. Perhaps even in the short term.
https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?r=gith...
Switch to the impacts view and sort by "days active". I think it is safe to say, any developer with days active >= 25% is a grafana labs employee or somebody that really loves to contribute to grafana because they are being paid to.
This is exactly what the parent is saying though. They're going through this process to ensure that their business remains viable and they can continue to build and support the project.
> All of the most important software of our lifetime is going through this relicensing effort as the creators attempt to capture the value of what it enables.
To me this sounds like the relicensing is done so that a few programmers finally can get paid for their hard labor while maintaining critical software we're all using. What's actually happening here is that some creators have convinced a few investors that they'll be able to give a huge return on invest by building up a sales department around the product. And now the realize that they're not able to accomplishing that with their original license.
It's a perfectly acceptable business strategy, but it's not necessarily the only way of running an open source project.
I'm still hoping that we (the open source community) can find even better ways of ensuring high-quality software remain open source without being so dependent on current mindset of investors.
Ahem: Grafana Labs Brings In $50M Series B For Open-Source Developer Platform: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/grafana-labs-brings-in-50m-...
I completely support the right to chose your own license and how you want to sell and use your own code, but let's be honest here. This is done because investors have discovered that it's possible to earn money on services around Open Source products, and Grafana Labs has gone all-in on this approach. Now they need the relicensing in order for the business model to remain viable. We're lucky that the code remains AGPL, but notice that they are still not committed to ensuring that all the code will remain AGPL (i.e. they still want CLA so they can relicense later).