Netdata - "The open-source observability platform everyone needs!" (from their GitHub description) has been shipping their new dashboard (UI v2) as closed source blobs under a proprietary license (Netdata Cloud UI License v1.0) with no access to its source code. The old open source dashboards (UI v0 and UI v1) are going to be removed, leaving users no choice but to use the proprietary dashboard.
Please see https://mastodon.social/@wolfshappen@fellies.social/11297258... for a detailed overview of the entire issue. I will try my best to narrate them here :).
Netdata is a popular "open source" observability platform. By July 20, 2023, they released a new dashboard (UI v2) which is completely closed source, built in a private repository and is shipped under a proprietary license (https://github.com/netdata/netdata/blob/master/src/web/gui/v...). This license explicitly prevents any kind of reverse engineering or separation:
> The Software is provided in a binary form for use by end-users. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or modify the Software. The Software is licensed as a single product and its component parts may not be separated.
Netdata owns Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) Best Practices Badge (which is awarded only to free/libre open source software) but is now under discussion for removal because of the blobs - https://github.com/coreinfrastructure/best-practices-badge/i....
Major Linux distros are also aware of this issue.
Debian - still ships the pre-blobs version, has an open bug report - https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1045145.
Nix - Split by themselves, packaged Netdata Cloud separately - https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/c3aa7b8938b17aebd2deec...
Alpine, OpenSUSE, Red Hat, Fedora etc. have been made aware of the issue and are working on a patch.
On the other hand, the open source dashboards v0 and v1 will be removed soon - https://github.com/netdata/netdata/pull/18125. Leaving users no choice by default but to use the closed-source dashboard.
So if you have been using Netdata because you loved it for being open source, then you might have to reconsider your option :).
(I used a title that explains the problem better, please let me know if it can be worded better.)
Thanks!
