Does grafana plugin need to be opensource for AGPL license?

[yangliuyu]

Since grafana 8 change license to AGPL 3.0, do I need to opensource the commercial plugin when deploy both to my customer’s server? If I don’t modify the grafana and bundle the grafana with my plugin together, do I violate the AGPL terms?

[svetb]

UPDATE: see @RichiH’s answer below

I am far from being a lawyer - and therefore reluctant to give anything that might look or sound like legal advice. But my speculative take is that yes, that would be counter to the AGPL license. My understanding of the implications of AGPL is that if you use a piece of AGPL-licensed code as part of a bigger application, then the rest of the application needs to be open-sourced also.

I think (but am not 100% sure) that this is also the case even if you don’t actually modify the AGPL-licensed part of the application.

Then of course you may have gray areas around what counts as an “application” and where you draw the boundaries there. But in your case, it’s probably fair to say that the functionality of a Grafana plugin is fairly inseparable from Grafana itself.

[RichiH]

You are free to license your plugins how you want.

As per Q&A with Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt about our licensing changes | Grafana Labs , our own FLOSS plugins are and will remain under Apache 2.

[yangliuyu]

Thanks, if I’m not wrong, when I develop a commercial licensed closed source plugin and package it with unmodified grafana, I can distribute the whole package to my customer.