In response to allegations that SkyWalking was redistributed in violation of the Apache 2.0 license, Volcano Engine responded by saying.

The person in charge of Volcano Engine said that after receiving feedback from the community, Volcano Engine first investigated the matter and is adding SkyWalking’s copyright statement to the relevant product documentation and distribution SDK, and is contacting developers to apologize.

Volcano Engine will strictly follow the open source community norms and conduct a comprehensive self-examination to avoid such problems from happening again.

The story is that Apache SkyWalking, for its part, previously issued a notice stating that Volcano Engine’s Application Performance Monitoring - Distributed Tracing had been redistributed in violation of the Apache SkyWalking; it did not comply with the requirements of the Apache 2.0 license.

The reason for this is that Apache SkyWalking received a license violation report from one of the submitters (anonymous) on January 28th, stating that Volcano Engine has a cloud service called Application Performance Monitoring - Distributed Tracing, which is in the Java Service Monitoring section, and provides the following link to download the proxy.

wget https://datarangers.com.cn/apminsight/repo/v2/download/java-agent/apminsight-java-agent_latest.tar.gz

Apache SkyWalking downloaded it on January 28, at 23:15, archived here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UCITmAfoKWfQpBXoQWfhaSA_5C88_sgO/view?usp=sharing

and noted that they have confirmed that this is a distribution of the SkyWalking Java Agent. Also cited (which you can compare with the official SkyWalking source code

  1. The first and simplest part is the agent.config file, which uses the same configuration keys and the same configuration format.

    This is the Volcengine version, available at SkyWalking agent.config.

    sobyte

  2. In apmplus-agent.jar, the core jar file for Volcengine’s agent, you can easily find several core classes that are identical to SkyWalking’s core classes.

    The ComponentsDefine class has not changed at all, even the component IDs and names are the same. This is the version of Volcengine, see SkyWalking’s version

    sobyte

  3. The code name, package name and code hierarchy are all exactly the same as SkyWalking 6.x version.

    This is the package hierarchy for Volcengine, available at SkyWalking’s version

    sobyte

The announcement says: The Volcano Engine team has changed all soft package names, removed the Apache Software Foundation statement from the code header, and redistributed without the Apache Software Foundation and Apache SkyWalking LICENSE and NOTICE files. In addition, there is no statement on their website that they are distributing SkyWalking. All of the above proves that they are in violation of the Apache 2.0 License and do not respect the IP and brand of the Apache Software Foundation and Apache SkyWalking.