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Grafana Changing License

Alex Woodie has some bad news for us:

Grafana is switching licensing of its core products from Apache License 2.0 to the more restrictive Affero General Public License (GPL) v3. The company made the change in an attempt to balance the value of open source with Grafana’s monetization strategy, CEO Raj Dutt announced yesterday.

Grafana has been considering a license change for some time, Dutt wrote in a blog post on April 20. This week, the company finally felt the time was right to move.

“Oof” was my first response. I know that a pretty large percentage of companies won’t touch AGPL. I don’t know if we’ll see these companies adopt the commercial version of Grafana, see the companies switch over to something else, or see developers fork Grafana and come up with some other product. AGPL is not quite as scary for companies when a product is at the end of the chain, as visualization and dashboarding products tend to be, but for many companies, that doesn’t matter.