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Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

kerkour.fr

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Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#141

Post by rcdwealth »

Hello Sylvain,

Today I was reading news.ycombinator.com

and found your website: https://www.kerkour.fr/blog/bloom-a-free-and-open-source-goo...

You may consider me free software supporter since 1999. That is how long I am using GNU operating systems with Linux kernel.

I am business consultant too, helping people to startup in business.

Let me give you few comments on your website:

Congratulation on publishing software under the GNU Affero Public license.

> Bloom: a free and open source Google

Please note that "Google" is a trademark. While Google will not react that fast, you should. As you are using the trademark to promote your own services, be it free software or not, that is really wrong approach.

> The social crisis

I agree there are social crisis situation in the world. But I don't agree in generalities and presentation that is making it general. As it is not. There are many areas in the world where people do not have social crisis. You would not be able to convince them.

> How is the world's wealth shared among its > population?

Well let me say that "world" does not own any wealth. Your statement is deceptive, and I even don't see why that type of politics shall be involved with the software that you so nicely published under the Affero GNU Public License. Don't give people politics, if you are providing software that everybody can use. That is incompatible.

Make one separate page for your world's wealth politics.

World does not "own" wealth. You are mistaken. It is owned by private individuals and corporations that in turn also belong to private individuals, some of them being non-profit corporations that are now owned by any particular person.

Wealth is not "shared" because "world" does not share "wealth".

Wealth is obtained by providing products, services, production.

Some of people are successful and they earn more than you do. Majority of people who do earn very much, may decide, but that it their own free will, to contribute to society.

However, wealth is theirs.

There is no such thing as "global wealth distribution", as nobody "distributes" wealth. It is earned and obtained by providing services in exchange, by providing products in exchange, by producing something in exchange for something.

If I am carpenter, and I produce a chair, I am giving you the chair and get some money. You have the chair, I have the money.

If you consider both of those items to belong to "wealth" set, then you must also consider both sides of the scale: the chair and the money.

If I have provided many chairs in the USA, there are many chairs in the USA "distributed" to various households.

But you don't consider in your observations how much wealth (chairs, goods, products, services, manufacturing of plethods of things) was created by people and private individuals and corporations who you are targeting with those silly graphics about "wealth distribution".

You only present it in the manner to say that there is something wrong that someone was smarter or some group was better organized and earning more than you.

I find it selfish and thoughtless.

> Patents and copyrights

I totally agree with you. But that is how it is, and now we and you are using GNU Affero Public license to protect the free software.

> Open source

No, I don't agree with you at all.

> Open source: The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.

> The best known example of open source is GNU/Linux, a free and open source operating system that is used by the majority of servers and phones today.

Absolutely not.

You are so much mistaken.

Please read the definition of free software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms: [1]

    The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
    The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
    The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
    The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
1. If it is centralized and free software it really does not matter. It can be made centralized. But "centralized" or "decentralized" is not subject of free software. It can be made by any model for as long as it is free, see definition above.

2. Open collaboration -- this really does not matter. Many free software programs have been programmed without "open collaboration". Who says that free software "must be open for collaboration" -- it need not have any Git access or SVN access or at all be "open" for everybody. It can be a package of software available for download with the free software license, that is good enough. As you have the freedom to modify it, you or anybody can decide to make some collaboration or not. It is not a characteristic of free software.

And finally GNU is certainly NOT a good example for "open source". In fact, with your lack of fundamentals about free software you are undermining the efforts of free software supports.

Please read here why: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point

I hope you understand the points and that you will respect this opinion.

Jean

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#142

Post by em-bee »

z0mbie42 wrote: post #18
brandonhorst wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I work for Google (not on google.com), and would definitely fit into the "geek" category, and I still assumed you were talking about an OSS search engine.

Hi, currently we absolutely do not plan to create a search engine: it requires too much resources for self hosting, I think we currently have great option for all the spectrum (From Google search to DuckDuckGo), and because an open source search engine will be tricked by all kind of nasty SEO Experts and it will be very hard to promote actually good Content. I dared the Google comparison thinking about it's productiv…

if i'd think that we have enough alternative search options, i'd have ignored this topic completely. i clicked because i disagree, because we do need more search options.

that said, we desperately need what bloom provides too. i just would not have recognized it from that title.

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#143

Post by wyldfire »

ddebernardy wrote: post #9
z0mbie42 wrote: post #2

Hi HN, creator here! Today is a good day, the achievement of months of works (but also the start of a great adventure ). I'm very excited to announce Bloom: A free and Open source ‘Google’. Our mission ? Empowering the world with open technologies. Why? How? What? https://kerkour.com/blog/bloom-a-free-and-open-source-google Website: https://bloom.sh Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bloom…

It's a laudable project but why are you accepting bitcoin if you're so concerned about the ecological crisis? It seems kind of contradictory, given how bitcoin transactions are so computationally expensive now that they reportedly consume about the same amount of energy as Denmark.

How would we know if that were too much? What if you were to describe the amount of energy consumed by the airline industry? Or all of the world's motorcycles? Would that be more or less than Denmark? And if it were more than Denmark's energy consumption, is that okay? Certainly more people benefit from the world's motorcycles or airplanes than just the population of Denmark, so why is that the reference? IMO including an arbitrary reference like some country's power consumption is the stuff of clickbait headlines, not useful discussion.

IMO a more constructive discussion point might be: "the power consumption required for Bitcoin's proof-of-work is 15x that of the power consumption of: { the equities markets + banking + US Treasury + EU Treasury }." The number I've cited is arbitrary, it could easily be 1/15 of that, for all I know. But normalizing the energy in terms of the related/baseline industry makes sense and would make for a clearer conversation on the topic.

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#145

Post by ryanlol »

ddebernardy wrote: post #9
z0mbie42 wrote: post #2

Hi HN, creator here! Today is a good day, the achievement of months of works (but also the start of a great adventure ). I'm very excited to announce Bloom: A free and Open source ‘Google’. Our mission ? Empowering the world with open technologies. Why? How? What? https://kerkour.com/blog/bloom-a-free-and-open-source-google Website: https://bloom.sh Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bloom…

It's a laudable project but why are you accepting bitcoin if you're so concerned about the ecological crisis? It seems kind of contradictory, given how bitcoin transactions are so computationally expensive now that they reportedly consume about the same amount of energy as Denmark.

But individual bitcoin transactions aren’t expensive, running the network is.

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#146

Post by fock »

z0mbie42 wrote: post #26
Fej wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding (2), how are you funding the initial phase of the project? After all, you're offering 30 GB of storage - twice Google.

Storage is very cheap. I did not expect to reach Google's scale during the next month so currently we are bootstrapped and rely on some AWS credits :)

Not sure what kind of money you got, but for me S3-storage costs about 0.6USD/30GB*month. Multiply this by 100 and you got a bill of 60USD/month - which is not much if you are a cash-bloated startup but not really sustainable for a bootstrapped, non-exponential (that's the point when you're talking about challenges like climate change. stop growing) business, which want's to survive on user donations, once you reach several thousand users. If you got the really cheap stuff from online.net, I recommend you don't raise any hopes in Google-scale availability...

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#147

Post by fock »

z0mbie42 wrote: post #107
bradknowles wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect, if you're not targeting Google Search, then you're not targeting "Google". You don't help your case by misleading your prospective customers, who are themselves self-identified "geeks" who might be able to help you make this goal a success.

After all the feedback I think a better comparison would be Apple. I used 'Google' because it's really clear for everyone how this company is shaping the world (for the better or the worst).

best comparison would be Nextcloud.

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#148

Post by zrm »

z0mbie42 wrote: post #18
brandonhorst wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I work for Google (not on google.com), and would definitely fit into the "geek" category, and I still assumed you were talking about an OSS search engine.

Hi, currently we absolutely do not plan to create a search engine: it requires too much resources for self hosting, I think we currently have great option for all the spectrum (From Google search to DuckDuckGo), and because an open source search engine will be tricked by all kind of nasty SEO Experts and it will be very hard to promote actually good Content. I dared the Google comparison thinking about it's productiv…

> and because an open source search engine will be tricked by all kind of nasty SEO Experts and it will be very hard to promote actually good Content.

FWIW I suspect that would be the opposite, because if it was free software then you would end up with many forks of the code that decides how to prioritize results, which would multiply the effort required by SEO spammers to target you. Meanwhile you would start with far fewer users and be that much less of a worthwhile target for that reason. And by the time you're big enough to be worth targeting, you have the resources to spend addressing it.

Re: Show HN: Bloom – A free and open source 'Google'

#149

Post by z0mbie42 »

chabes wrote: post #102
z0mbie42 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, currently we absolutely do not plan to create a search engine: it requires too much resources for self hosting, I think we currently have great option for all the spectrum (From Google search to DuckDuckGo), and because an open source search engine will be tricked by all kind of nasty SEO Experts and it will be very hard to promote actually good Content. I dared the Google comparison thinking about it's productiv…

“Productivity is the current foundation, but you can think having a Bloom open source tractor in some years” Open source agriculture has so much potential for good. I’m surprised it isn’t more of a thing already

Hi, I totally agree.

I think one of the reasons, is that people interested in agriculture are not the startup-geek who think scalability first but rather people more interested in collaboration and little community projects.

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