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Bear is now source-available

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Bear is now source-available

#151

Post by sunshowers »

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.

There are good reasons the so-called "BSD zealots" won the so-called "culture war", such as the definition of a derived work being largely uncharted territory. Did you know that there's a compelling legal argument that the GPL attaches to programs talking to each other via JSON data structures?

I think MPL 2.0 is the ideal kind of copyleft, because of its scope being very clear.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#152

Post by orthoxerox »

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…

> 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.

This statement is 100% correct. Open means open for everyone. There's a "but they are providing FOSS as a service on a proprietary platform", which seems like the next step on the LGPL-GPL-AGPL stairway of licenses, but SSPL failed to convince anyone it was a necessary freedom:

- MongoDB Inc obviously had no plans to release their own SaaS platform under SSPL

- AWS source code being released wouldn't have benefited anyone other than maybe other major cloud providers

Re: Bear is now source-available

#153

Post by sarlalian »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #101
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…

If it's source available like this then it's clearly not a "community project"

If you look at the commit graph, it’s definitely not a community project.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#154

Post by jibal »

adastra22 wrote: post #130
dragonwriter wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free Software and Open Source have definitions that are both on their face and in practical application by the bodies responsible for each almost entirely identical. Neither is a subset of the other. If you are concerned about mandating users provide modifications by a similar license to the one they received material under, what you want is copyleft .

“Free software” means copyleft. The free software foundation manages copyleft licenses. The term open source was explicitly coined to differentiate from the more restrictive free software / copyleft. All free software licenses are open source licenses. Not all open source licenses are free software licenses.

You are correct ... the other responses to you are not. "Free software" as in the FSF is "free as in freedom, not free as in free beer", which is why copyleft was invented, to establish such a distinction.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#155

Post by KolmogorovComp »

dinkleberg wrote: post #96
edu wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find amusing is that it's built on top of Django and of course uses a few other dependencies[0], and without them the project wouldn't even exist... 0. https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/master/requi...

That argument can be made for virtually every piece of software. We all build on top of the work of others.

The argument is that why should I be able to use software for free but do not want mine to be used the same way?

Re: Bear is now source-available

#156

Post by jinzo »

arp242 wrote: post #89
jakelazaroff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have no problem with non-open source software. The gnashing of teeth comes in when projects like Terraform become successful specifically because they're open source , and then the maintainer changes to a closed source license that would have prevented the project from being successful in the first place. Doubly so when they relicense outside contributors' work with a closed source license because those c…

Quite a few people commenting here are having problems with it in the case of Bearblog though, including some pretty wild accusations. And lets be real here: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/graphs/contributo... Looking at the details of that, the only two (small) substantial code changes from other people are "User can delete their own account" from 2020, and "Use cloudflare online dns api to perform domai…

If we are real, it's also quite clear that contributions are not accepted at least from 2023. And the Readme talked about the project not meant to be self-hosted in the past.

I have no horse in the race, just think that maybe this project is not a good measure of contributions.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#157

Post by MangoToupe »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #105
bachmeier wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If you aren't interested in open source, that's your option, but open source has had a clear meaning for decades. You can use/write your software and people that believe in open source can use/write open sour…

Whether they contribute back their changes to their users.

That's copyleft, something OSI was basically created to not imply.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#158

Post by jaredklewis »

swiftcoder wrote: post #145
jaredklewis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We definitely agree on this point. Different licenses select for different things.

It is an annoying problem to have, but if your goal is to be able to support yourself by working on your open source project full time (not saying this has to be or should be everyone’s goal), then having big tech engineers nagging you is probably a good problem to have.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#160

Post by rozab »

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…

In this case it's kind of unbelievable how quickly the flip happened. Their 'manifesto'[0] was published only at the start of the year, where they vowed to be an incorruptible bastion of stability in a selfish society focused on short-term thinking. They want Bear to be around in 50 years.

Then in the last couple weeks or so[1] it seems they saw a bit of a spike, and immediately pulled up the ladder.

They even criticised this sort of behaviour in their manifesto:

>We've seen our fair share of open-source projects become sour (see the recent Wordpress drama) or abandoned entirely. We've seen OpenAI become ClosedAI. There's a common thread here. Trust isn't just a legal structure, but a social contract.

I am actually totally in favor of source available licenses, but in this case it seems counter to all the boasts the developer has made about their platform.[2]

[0]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/ [1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... [2]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-foreve...

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