I am writing a datasource for my product, so that data can be rendered in Grafana. I distribute my product to customer. Do I need to open source my datasource code as well?
1) We distribute Grafana as docker container along with our product to customers. What is the impact for us and our customers?
2) We build Grafana on a platform which is not supported by out of the box. What is the impact for us and our customers?
You'll need to give your customers the source code you used to build Grafana. If your customers are just using it internally, then they have no new obligations. If they're letting customers of their own use it, then they have the same new obligations that you do.
Thank you for clarification. I read about Confluents decision about the license change. It looks like Confluent has opposite view than Grafana labs about AGPL.
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Why didn’t Confluent use AGPL?
AGPL doesn’t solve the problem we are trying to fix. AGPL allows cloud service providers to sell services using the exact software being licensed, and charge for it, without any limitation. This means the software developer has become the unpaid developer and maintainer for the cloud service provider—which is not a scenario we want to enable.
Also, AGPL is too aggressive for our customers who need to redistribute commercial products. If you put AGPL code in a distributed program, you have to open source the whole program. We want you to be able to embed our code in proprietary applications, change it and not worry about open sourcing any of your changes. We don’t think that proprietary applications are bad, and we think it’s great if you use Confluent Community software to create them.:"
It sounds like Confluent doesn't get what the real problem is. There's 2 ways developers who also sell hosting end up losing all their market share to players like Amazon:
1. The big players like Amazon make custom, proprietary modifications to the software they're hosting, and since they're not technically distributing it, they don't have to release the changes, giving them an unfair advantage. This is the exact loophole that the AGPL closes.
2. Sometimes, the big players are just better/more efficient at hosting the exact same software the exact same way. There's nothing unfair or unethical about this; it's how the free market is meant to work that customers flock to them.
Confluent is trying to "fix" the second "problem", which rather than making anything more fair, just makes it unfair in their favor.
