Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bear is now source-available

herman.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 509 posts

Re: Bear is now source-available

#141

Post by drdaeman »

arccy wrote: post #68
tptacek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might take that up with the FSF, which clearly disagrees with you about its "affront".

[flagged]

No offense meant, but what's wrong with y'all today, people? Why so many folks in the comments use words in a way that doesn't match their dictionary-intended meanings and even insist that doing otherwise is something... weird, in a bad way? Am I taking crazy pills?

Save for The Church of Emacs and St. IGNUcius (obvious jokes), FSF is a political and social activism organization - not a religious one. They have foundational principles and manifestos, sure, but those aren't religious dogmas, but rather the views/desires how the society should work.

Labeling FSF as religious implies that it's a cult and thus there's no talking reason to them. But they're no more religious than any other civil rights movement - the beliefs about software freedoms are no different than beliefs in any other social rights.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#142

Post by yencabulator »

delichon wrote: post #83
jorams wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know something's broken when Microsoft gets to claim to be the biggest backer of open source. They can say whatever they want. They're just lying. If you spend even a little bit of time looking into it you'll find it's just a marketing strategy.

I spent a little time looking into it, and it turns out that Microsoft owns an outfit named GitHub, which apparently offers free hosting for open source projects and is used by a lot of open source software makers. And Microsoft has around 4k employees with contributions to OS projects on GitHub. So maybe "biggest" is a lie in light of their anti-OS efforts, but it is at least arguable. Can you propose a bigger one?

Microsoft is the biggest supporter of Microsoft gaining market share.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#143

Post by orthoxerox »

darkwater wrote: post #136
lispisok wrote: post #131

"I released source code under the MIT license and people are now using it to their financial benefit. Who could have possibly seen this coming?" Why does this keep happening? Why are so may developers blind to this obvious outcome?

Because between 15 and 20 years ago the BSD zealots won that culture war. I would really love to see a simulation where GNU licenses won that culture war and which landscape we would have today.

GPL wouldn't have changed anything. Or even AGPL, if you had been running an unmodified Bear instance.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#144

Post by swiftcoder »

cinericius wrote: post #3

As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source, and they'll get very upset at you if you claim it is. I'd like to see some recognition from this crowd of the "free-ride competition" problem as this author puts it. What Herman is doing is a service to us all, and we should find a term (better than 'source-availa…

> the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd

The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing.

The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals

Re: Bear is now source-available

#145

Post by swiftcoder »

jaredklewis wrote: post #104
NoahZuniga wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, many developers publish their code not because they want to specifically make a successful open source project, but because they made something that was useful to themselves, and like the idea behind open source. In that case it makes more sense to do a copyleft license because it will legally require all derivatives to also follow that open source idea.

Yea I think stuff like this is great and will have some impact around the edges. Perhaps particularly in the realm of end-user software, like a window tiling manager. But once we start talking about the kind of software large corporations (like AWS) will have an interest in, projects have to be successful to be useful. Software requires maintenance so the maintainers need to be able to devote their time to maintainin…

> once we start talking about the kind of software large corporations (like AWS) will have an interest in

I'm not sure why someone who is spending their limited free time building software to give away for free would want Amazon as a downstream consumer

Do you enjoy spending your nights and weekends dealing with CVE reports, while a high-6-figure BigTech engineer nags you that they need it fixed?

Re: Bear is now source-available

#146

Post by gkbrk »

the_duke wrote: post #139

We are also entering the age of "hey AI, take this repo, reimplement the same functionality". Now, no LLM is currently anywhere near doing that for ElasticSearch. But for a project with 4845 lines of Python code? (as per tokei) Definitely doable, with a bit of handholding and manual fixing. Would that be a derivative work? Maybe, but that would be a hard legal battle.

> Now, no LLM is currently anywhere near doing that for ElasticSearch.

You could probably feed all of ElasticSearch into an LLM and ask it to "reimplement it" successfully. But why would you even bother? There's already an existing open-source alternative called OpenSearch [1].

[1]: https://github.com/opensearch-project/opensearch

Re: Bear is now source-available

#147

Post by swiftcoder »

gpm wrote: post #73
barnabee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a strong feeling that speaking to a lawyer might reveal that to be untrue

I have a strong feeling you would be told "we don't know, it's never been tested in court, there's a chance you would win and a chance you would lose on that argument".

Yeah, but lawyers say that about just about everything

Re: Bear is now source-available

#148

Post by archagon »

moralestapia wrote: post #134

>It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it. No, you don't believe in open source, hypocrite. Open source means anyone can use it, even for commercial purposes, and you knew this from day zero. Honestly, no sympathy for these people, as this happens over and over again, they actually exploit the very few good intended OSS people. They portray their project as open source initially, to gather sympathy…

Or... maybe they actually need money to keep maintaining the project? Not everyone is out there living a life of leisure.

If open source purists can't accept that, they'll find their cause gradually shrinking into nothing.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#149

Post by dewey »

lispisok wrote: post #131

"I released source code under the MIT license and people are now using it to their financial benefit. Who could have possibly seen this coming?" Why does this keep happening? Why are so may developers blind to this obvious outcome?

MIT was always the easy default that every project used, you just select it from the GitHub dropdown and you are done when setting up a new project. I think you can't really blame people for using it.

Especially when your project is new it's also not often clear that this project will become something more serious later where you have to worry about such things as people cloning your project.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#150

Post by jibal »

swiftcoder wrote: post #144
cinericius wrote: post #3

As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source, and they'll get very upset at you if you claim it is. I'd like to see some recognition from this crowd of the "free-ride competition" problem as this author puts it. What Herman is doing is a service to us all, and we should find a term (better than 'source-availa…

> the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing. The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals

The MIT and BSD licenses predated the GPL. People have a choice as to which ethic to follow ... it's not the result of a corporate conspiracy. (And I'm a social democrat, not a corporate simp.)
Post reply on HN