Please clarify licensing around OIDC

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1

Hi there,

IIRC, OIDC was contributed to grist-core by a third party (associated with the french government?): Add native OIDC support in Grist #707 by fflorent · Pull Request #717 · gristlabs/grist-core · GitHub, presumably under Apache 2.0.

As such, I was very surprised to see that my Grist instances complained to me that OIDC was now a paid-only feature. (or “license-key-only”? This is unclear.)

Has the licensing of the OIDC code been changed? Has the original author ( fflorent (Florent) · GitHub ) agreed?

I do not have a license key installed on my instance (nor do I intend to, see below). At the same time, the OIDC integration (with my Gitlab) that I have set up appears to continue to work, in apparent contradiction to the stated license key requirement.

Furthermore, it appears to me that Grist categorically relies on third-party auth providers, and IIRC, when I installed Grist, OIDC and SAML were the only options. I understand that, following this documentation page, nowadays:

  • forwarded headers
  • “GristConnect”, and
  • sign-in that’s critically dependent on a proprietary service run by a third party

are the only remaining options in the “community edition”. I recall OIDC was painful to get working with Grist, and its implementation appears to (continue to) have significant issues (example). I guess I can slop together an OIDC-to-“GristConnect” bridge if I have to (which I would release as open source, because you’re welcome). But I would first like positive confirmation that this is what’s needed.

I understand that Grist Labs needs to make money. I am supportive of that goal, and I have repeatedly sponsored Grist Labs on Github, most recently on June 30 of this year. This apparent change, whose impact includes cutting off previously-enthusiastic users from their painfully-installed authentication methods, appears ill-conceived in furtherance of that goal.

At this point, I have no idea what is going on. Clarification of the status of OIDC would be very welcome.

Note that I am not at all interested in installing a “license key”, irrespective of whether it is free of charge in my situation. I like the notion that I own the software I run and can do with it as I please, without funny permission bits controlled by a third party.

Thanks,

Andreas

2

Hi @Andreas_Kloeckner, the licensing of the OIDC implementation has not changed. You can read a community member analysis here One Grist, one edition, in grist-core . If an existing install has stopped working, my apologies, and you could file that as a bug and Grist Labs will work to fix it (I haven’t heard of this happening).

Grist Labs (the company) supports OIDC when used with Full Grist. You’ll see that reflected in the documentation we maintain and the UI we build.

Forwarded Headers preceded OIDC, and GristConnect was something we created for a client a long time ago and open sourced (handy if integrating Grist with wordpress, but I don’t think many people do).

I understand you’re not interested in a free key, so I won’t suggest that path. Thank you for your past sponsorship of Grist Labs on GitHub!

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Thanks for the link.

I’ve discovered that this is mostly a dupe of