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Category: Licensing

Grafana Changing License

Published 2021-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

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.

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Elasticsearch and SSPL

Published 2021-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Vicky Brasseur looks at an announcement:

In a play to convert users of their open source projects into paying customers, today Elastic announced that they are changing the license of both Elasticsearch and Kibana from the open source Apache v2 license to Server Side Public License (SSPL). If your organisation uses the open source versions of either Elasticsearch or Kibana in its products or projects, it is now at risk of being forced to release its intellectual property under terms dictated by another.

Click through to understand the details. I’d imagine that if Elastic goes through with this, people would fork the last pre-SSPL version of their product sets and create a community spin-off, similar to MariaDB spinning off from MySQL.

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Power BI Premium Per User

Published 2020-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Adam Saxton is excited:

Are you curious what Power BI Premium Per User is all about? Adam walks you through how to get it and what it means from a user experience. Take advantage of Power BI Premium features without the Premium capacity price!

Click through for the video as well as a few links for more info.

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Power BI Premium Per-User Licensing

Published 2020-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

John White has some thoughts on a big announcement at Ignite:

The new Premium per user (PPU) license promises to solve this problem. Premium per user will be a new license that will include all of the capabilities of the Pro license, but will also include almost all of the features available in Premium. It will NOT include unlimited sharing. Users with this license will be able to publish content to a PPU workspace, and that content can be consumed by other users that have a PPU license.

The next question is of course going to be “great, so how much is it?”. Therein lies the rub.

This is why I’m interested, but not yet excited. I’d expect it to be more than $10 per user per month, as otherwise nobody would get a Pro SKU. But where, exactly, it lands above that is the key question. The number $50 per user per month comes to mind—the idea being that you save money up to 100 users, after which point it makes sense to switch to the fixed-price licensing. We’ll see what the real number looks like once they announce it.

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Licensing for SQL Server Reporting Services

Published 2020-07-08 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry explains licensing scenarios for SQL Server Reporting Services:

When you license SQL Server (of which the SQL Server Reporting Services engine is a part of) you license what is called the OSE or Operating System Environment. This is basically the OS that has SQL Server installed on it. Now, this can be the virtualization host (VMware or Hyper-V) or it can be the Windows Server (SSRS isn’t available on Linux, so we don’t have to deal with that, but if SSRS was available on Linux the rules would be the same as Windows). You can install SQL Server (or SSRS) as many times inside that OSE as you want to, but you can’t install SQL Server (or SSRS) on any other machines.

SSRS licensing isn’t too difficult to understand, relatively speaking.

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Balancing SQL Server Core Licenses Across NUMA Nodes

Published 2020-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Glenn Berry explains how to get yourself out of a pickle in Standard Edition:

Ok, that is bad enough, but it gets worse. Unless you fix it, SQL Server 2019 Standard Edition will use 32 logical cores on NUMA node 0, but only 16 logical cores on NUMA node 1. This can have a significant negative effect on performance. What you want is for SQL Server to use 24 logical cores on each NUMA node.

Glenn then explains how to pull this off.

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Options for Read-Only Licensing with Power BI

Published 2020-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad explains that, depending on how much you’re willing to pay, there are ways of letting users view your dashboards for free:

In most of my presentations all around the world, I still get this question often: “Is there a Read-Only license for Power BI?”, and often starts with “I have some end-users, who are not building any reports, I don’t want to pay for Developer License for them”. I have written about Licensing in Power BI previously, however, I believe that the article is not explaining it clearly enough and there are still some questions around it. So here I am going to talk about this only: The Read-Only license for Power BI.

Read on for the answers. It’s not all terrible news, but at the very low end, the answer isn’t great.

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Explaining the HA/DR Licensing Changes

Published 2020-02-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant goes into the fairly recent licensing changes for SQL Server:

Which surprised me a bit because these licensing changes have been in-place for a while now. With this in mind, I thought I would discuss them here to raise awareness about the changes.

To clarify, in SQL Server 2019 there have been some big licensing changes about what you can and can’t do on a passive fail-over instance. Especially if you have Software Assurance.

Which I have to admit I am really excited about. Because it opens up some new possibilities which I will explain below. Of course, there are other significant updates in the licensing guide as well.

Read on for the details.

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High Availability Announcements from Microsoft

Published 2019-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Allan Hirt looks at a couple announcements from Microsoft:

I’m going to discuss what I feel are the biggest game changers. I knew licensing was changing as I had conversations with Microsoft around this months ago. I was not sure what the final result was going to be, but I’m fairly pleased. Is it perfect? No, but it’s much better than it was.

You’ll definitely want to read Allan’s thoughts on Microsoft’s SQL Server licensing changes, as well as a private preview of Azure Shared Disks.

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Licensing for SQL Server Big Data Clusters

Published 2019-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Mohammad Darab tackles the licensing question for Big Data Clusters:

One of the biggest questions I had when I first started diving into Big Data Clusters was, “What about licensing….how will that work?” With so many different instances running on the storage pool, data pool and compute pool nodes will licensing cost too much? The answer I got from Microsoft was that it will “be competitive”.

Well, with the general availability of SQL Server as of this week, Microsoft is making it way more financially attractive than I thought. Below is a summation of the SQL Server 2019 Licensing Guide for Big Data Clusters.

Click through for the explanation. It really is pretty simple, all things considered.

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