Hmm. Where does Grafana people stand on what constitutes a "derivative" work? Are my Grafana dashboards derivatives of Grafana, and must now be published? If I embed a Grafana dashboard in my application, is my application now a derivative of Grafana and must be released as AGPLv3?
The Q&A suggests that "unmodified" distributions are not an issue. But if I distribute dashboards, custom configurations, etc - is that a "modification" ?
nope, that wouldn't be a modification to the AGPL-licensed grafana. you are free to do that.
plus, dashboards and configuration are inherently ("source available"), so even if one were to consider them to be modifications (which they're not), you are already distributing them in source form ;-)
> A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.
Doesn't a product that offers grafana-powered dashboards "form a larger program" ?
If you're just exposing your grafana instance, no - and probably not if you're iframing them or similar. If you're actually embedding grafana into your program then yes, but that would be a strange way to structure a system.
Yes, I was thinking about an iframe, but I don't think the technological details matter, do they? As long as grafana is a core part of your product, then your whole product has to be AGPL, according to the license...
If your product is integrated closely enough with grafana to constitute a derivative work under copyright law, yes. That's a complicated and murky area of law, but it's unlikely that just iframing in an otherwise separate webapp as a metrics page would be enough to trigger it.
(Whereas if you integrate e.g. editing metrics and calling grafana's API to add them to a dashboard, at that point it seems far more likely your system would be considered a derivative of grafana - but at that point you really are implementing a grafana editor product (or at least a product that includes a grafana editor) rather than just using grafana to monitor a separate product).
Thank you for responding. What about the case where Grafana is embedded into an application, potentially even with a custom Grafana data source. That might be more of a problematic case?
That's probably a question for the courts (in terms of what constitutes a derivative work). If it's a generic proxy that just passes requests on then probably not. If it's deeply integrated with the grafana API then probably. Just like wrapper scripts around GPLed executables.
