Toooootttallllly random question, 10000% not inspi...
# generalc
Colt McNealy
08/29/2024, 10:21 PMToooootttallllly random question, 10000% not inspired by the Elastic news today. If a company called SmallPony were to release a product under the AGPL license in addition to SSPL license, would AWS be able to easily offer it as a service?
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Gwen Shapira
08/29/2024, 10:22 PMTechnically, AGPL should prevent this.
In practice, I don't believe this was ever tested in court. And AWS may decide to take its chances.
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Colt McNealy
08/29/2024, 10:23 PMNeither was SSPL. But they decided to fork rather than test.
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Gwen Shapira
08/29/2024, 10:23 PMyeah
Gwen Shapira
08/29/2024, 10:23 PM🤷
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Colt McNealy
08/29/2024, 10:23 PMWhile I think I'm smart (and humble), I don't like my chances against AWS's lawyers, nor do I want to pay for a lawyer who does have a chance
Colt McNealy
08/29/2024, 10:24 PMHmm...something to think about.
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Gwen Shapira
08/29/2024, 10:24 PMyeah, I feel the same 🙂
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Mitch
08/29/2024, 11:29 PMg
Gwen Shapira
08/30/2024, 2:28 AMm
Mitch
08/30/2024, 2:29 AMIn this market you’re not allowed to rock the boat.
Mitch
08/30/2024, 2:29 AMAnd the idea of making something free isn’t a concept investors understand yet
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Colt McNealy
08/30/2024, 2:57 PMLosing 20% for that is insane
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Gwen Shapira
08/30/2024, 2:59 PMIt isn't even about the license... 99% of the folks who sold have no idea what AGPL vs SSPL mean.
As Mitch said "you are not allowed to rock the boat".
Gwen Shapira
08/30/2024, 2:59 PMMakes one grateful not to have a public company (yet!)
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Colt McNealy
09/02/2024, 5:33 PMHmm, I just saw that Aiven has a managed Grafana offering. Grafana is AGPL.
I read the licenses (sorry Mitch, I know you told me not to). The difference is that AGPL says basically you can't change the code, compile it, and then sell the binary without making your source code changes public.
SSPL says you can't throw the code on a server and sell that as a service without making the code that does the as a service part public too.
So probably what Aiven is doing is just putting the OSS grafana up on EC2. If it were SSPL, then Aiven would have to open-source their terraform modules + control plane + all that other stuff. But since they didn't modify anything in Grafana, AGPL doesn't really apply...?
Colt McNealy
09/02/2024, 5:38 PMSo to summarize my understanding, Grafana Labs Ltd. (the company) has some proprietary enterprise modifications to Grafana open source.
No one else can make proprietary enterprise modifications to Grafana Open Source and sell them (otherwise AGPL would kick in), but people can sell open source Grafana-as-a-Service.
In contrast, if Grafana had the SSPL license, selling Grafana-as-a-service would (in theory) mean that you have to open-source your entire control plane, monitoring stack, etc
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Mitch
09/02/2024, 5:38 PMI don’t think they’d have to do any of that.
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Mitch
09/02/2024, 5:38 PMAs long as it uses unmodified apis built into the software
Mitch
09/02/2024, 5:39 PMAs long as the code or objects are unmodified, any surrounding software is fine to keep private.(I think)
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Colt McNealy
09/02/2024, 5:40 PMI think (and hope) that's true of AGPL but not SSPL
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Gwen Shapira
09/02/2024, 5:40 PMcall me crazy, but did you guys consider the radical step of talking to an actual lawyer?
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Mitch
09/02/2024, 5:41 PMAnd miss the fun arm chair interpretation of a complex legal license on a public holiday?
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Gwen Shapira
09/02/2024, 5:41 PMhahaha, fair
Colt McNealy
09/02/2024, 5:42 PMg
Gwen Shapira
09/02/2024, 5:43 PMWhy did you base the SSPL on GPL v3 instead of AGPL?
The AGPL is a modified version of GPL v3. The only additional requirement of AGPL is in section 13: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, you must open source the source code corresponding to your modified version, known as the “Remote Network Interaction” provision of AGPL.
There is some confusion in the marketplace about the trigger and scope of the Remote Network Interaction provision of AGPL.
As a result, we decided to base the SSPL on GPL v3 and to add a new section 13 which clearly and explicitly sets forth the conditions to offering the licensed program as a third-party service.
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Colt McNealy
09/02/2024, 5:44 PMI think this makes it pretty clear that you can't easily run an SSPL-based thing as a service:
The only substantive modification is section 13, which makes clear the condition to offering MongoDB as a service. A company that offers a publicly available MongoDB as a service must release the software it uses to offer such service under the terms of the SSPL, including the management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the source code made available.Aiven's Grafana offering (and the fact that, unlike LittleHorse, they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars to waste on lawyers so they have 100% consulted counsel) says that you can run AGPL software as a service
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Mitch
09/02/2024, 5:44 PMThat’s how I’m reading it
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Gwen Shapira
09/02/2024, 5:45 PMor at least that this is a risk that they are willing to take
Gwen Shapira
09/02/2024, 5:45 PMand as you said, have the lawyers to throw at the problem if it comes up
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Colt McNealy
09/02/2024, 5:45 PMGrafana was also Apache2 until 2022, maybe Aiven forked it and hosts their fork? But that's unlikely