On August 13 2023, users of HashiCorp’s Terraform forked the software under the name OpenTF. This was a strong and rapid community reaction to HashiCorp switching the license on their products merely three days before. The list of companies and individuals pledging their support to the new fork has been overwhelming. The new license that HashiCorp has chosen for its products, the Business Source License (BSL), is no longer open source, but instead source-available.

Service providers need cloud infrastructure everywhere, from modern 5G and 6G network functions running in the network core to sophisticated AI/ML jobs running on the edge. Given the sensitivity of those workloads to any interruptions, outages or performance degradations, the cloud infrastructure used by telecommunication companies needs to be fast, robust and ultra stable.

Communities of all sorts, including open source communities, boil down to the daily interactions we have with one another. What we call “the community” emerges from a series of utterances and responses, which gives rise to relationships and networks. This makes “good reply game” essential to create, sustain, and grow an open source community.

This is the 25th year of the Open Source movement, and as with any social enterprise there is a constant effort to maintain and at times renegotiate the meaning of terms and the values behind them. Open Source is a child of the Free Software movement. It uncritically inherited its values and philosophy from its parent, but are those still sufficient today?

Before we do a detailed dive into what Prometheus and Datadog are, let's look at the key comparison points. Both Prometheus and Datadog are monitoring tools, but Prometheus is open source and Datadog is proprietary. Prometheus is the de facto tool for monitoring time-series for Kubernetes, and Datadog is an all-around APM, logs, time-series, and tracing tool.

Whenever you use open source software, you benefit from the community that surrounds it — whether it’s a bug fix, better documentation, a helpful tutorial or something else. We at Grafana Labs benefit from the open source community, too: from your participation, and the many OSS components we use in the development of Grafana itself. But what makes an open source community successful, exactly? And how do you build and nurture one?

At the recent KubeCon EU, we learned the significant news of the FluentBit v2.0 major release with numerous new features. What’s new and what’s to come for this key log aggregation tool? On the latest OpenObservability Talks, I hosted Eduardo Silva, one of the maintainers of Fluentd, a creator of Fluent Bit and co-founder of Calyptia.

For nearly a decade, Logz.io has offered a proven pathway for organizations using the world’s most popular open source tools to monitor and analyze their cloud systems—allowing them to enlist a far more efficient and cost-effective approach.

When we launched Pyroscope in 2021, we had one clear goal: Give developers a powerful open source continuous profiling tool for collecting, storing, and analyzing profiling data. Grafana Labs had a similar goal when they released Grafana Phlare, a horizontally scalable, highly available open source profiling solution inspired by databases like Grafana Loki, Grafana Mimir, and Grafana Tempo.

As you’d imagine, generative AI has been a huge topic here at Grafana Labs. We’re excited about its potential role in bridging the gap between people and the beyond-human scale of observability data we work with every day. We’ve also been talking a lot about where open source fits in — especially if that Google researcher is right and OSS will outcompete OpenAI and friends. What role can we play to bring the community along?