Bear is now source-available • Hacker News Board

Re: Bear is now source-available

#181

Post by zimpenfish » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 7:05 PM UTC

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

Not wanting to further widen the schism but wasn't that the free software people rather than the open source people? cf [0], particularly the "not as strict" part.

> In the late 1990's Eric Raymond and others developed the term "open source" as a more business friendly term than "free software", with a more inclusive meaning where licenses that were not as strict about the passing on of modifications would also quality for the term.

[0] https://www.freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Eric_...

Re: Bear is now source-available

#182

Post by levkk » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

happymellon wrote: post #38

ezekg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame on the people who recommend the AGPL to effectively be an OSI-approved source-available license. This is a grievance against the spirit of open source.

AGPL is exactly the spirit of open source. The license used by bear violates freedom 0. AGPL ensures that freedom 1, 2 and 3 are allowed even in hosted services scenarios. Freedom 0 the freedom to use the work Freedom 1 the freedom to study the work Freedom 2 the freedom to copy and share the work with others Freedom 3 the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative wor…

Gotta love these are zero-indexed. Written by an engineer for engineers.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#183

Post by adastra22 » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

cxr wrote: post #165

dragonwriter wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Free software” means copyleft. No, it doesn't. The FSF uses “Free Software” to refer to a broad class that is essentially identical to the OSI use of “Open Source.” The term the FSF uses for copyleft is “copyleft”, which is a subset of Free Software.

To underscore the point here: the FSF 1) hasn't/doesn't publish a free software definition that describes copyleft as a precondition to free software 2) hasn't/doesn't claim in any of their non-normative commentary that the definition has that precondition 3) readily and regularly refers to projects published under permissive licenses like the BSD, MIT/X11, and Apache licenses as "free software", despite not being co…

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Linked to from here:

https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

Very explicit about open source being different from free software.

Also if what you say is true, there would be no reason for “open source” to exist. It was coined by Christine Peterson explicitly because the term free software conveyed a different ideal than the BSD/MIT license crowd was aiming for.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#184

Post by cxr » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 7:10 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #33

happymellon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem that these folks have is that AGPL still allows other people to host the software. They want to seem altruistic but want to also be the only provider. GPL would have been a better initial license, and AGPL would have been the next logical step to ensure that changes that hosted services make can come back to the original version. I'm not entirely sure what they were hoping to get by making an extr…

They care that other people can sell the software, not that other people can use the software, which is why the license they use makes that distinction.

This is a confusing claim. Are you saying the chosen license (https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/998e87263248...>) makes the software free to use to offer (e.g. gratis) "hosted or managed service[s]" so long as one does not sell the services? This is trivially confirmed not to be true. It prohibits all use of the software to provide services, not just a prohibition on selling them.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#185

Post by gr4vityWall » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 7:12 PM UTC

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

Expanding on this, the Free Software movement always focused on freedom for users - which, in a world where copyright applies to computer programs, ultimately leads to the licenses you listed to repurpose it.

The Open Source movement usually tries to advocate for open-source as the best development model. As in, writing it in the open and contributing with other people will result in objectively better software in the long term. Others treated it (when the term was coined) as a marketing term for Free Software, making it more palatable to businesses whose people running it don't want to talk about ethics too much.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Re: Bear is now source-available

#186

Post by landdate » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 7:14 PM UTC

jaredklewis wrote: post #93

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…

People can license their software however they want, but it is worth reflecting on why almost all open source authors go with a permissive license like MIT: because it is basically a "buyer's market." When choosing a database, distributed queue, blogging platform, or whatever, companies usually have a choice of at least several high quality open source options. If one of those options places restrictions on the users…

> licensing your project GPL or the like usually means relegating it to obscurity

Subjective. Sure if you are talking about percent of market share, but it's a huge market, you don't need to capture even 1% of users to have a viable business.

The vast majority of the GNU ecosystem is GPL. Bash, git, Apache, Gimp, Blender, Libreoffice.

There are also a lot of projects that are dual licensed, allowing commercial software to be charged a fee and non-commercial software to use for free with GPL.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#187

Post by tsimionescu » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 7:15 PM UTC

jibal wrote: post #154

adastra22 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

No, this is completely wrong. Free/libre software is distinguished from "gratis" software, such as demos or shareware. Any software that is freely available for users to legally modify and redistribute however they see fit, under the same license or some other, is free software.

Examples of non-free software are shareware like WinRar, software only available for non-commercial use like OMNeT++ [0], and (slightly more controversially) things like ElasticSearch or MongoDB.

[0] https://omnetpp.org/intro/license

Re: Bear is now source-available

#188

Post by kelnos » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 7:16 PM UTC

passthejoe wrote: post #138

mynameisvlad wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They want to seem altruistic but want to also be the only provider. This is an overly negative take. At the end of the day, they are still providing software and the source code free to use for practically every purpose except directly competing with them. That's still altruistic while also being sensible in the real world rather than an ideal.

The license disallows use of the software for what it is intended: setting up a multi-user blogging system.

No, the license disallows use of the software for seeing up a multi-user blogging system as a paid service.

You might say, "well wouldn't that be most of what people might want to do with it?" And you might be right, but so what? No one is entitled to build their business on the back of someone else's work, not without their permission anyway.

That certainly makes software like this no longer Free Software. But I'm not religious about it, and maybe that's ok sometimes.

(It also runs afoul of several parts of the OSI Open Source Definition, but maybe that's ok too.)

Re: Bear is now source-available

#189

Post by Fordec » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 7:18 PM UTC

Its interesting that they went with the Elastic License. Maybe this is a leaf in the wind that we're going to see more adoption of the license outside of Elastic. I get it's not a "standard" license, but standard licenses become standard through adoption. Someone has to be early to the party.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#190

Post by upboundspiral » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

I don't have experience in the subject but recently listened to a podcast episode discussing the tension between open source and building a sustainable business by Oxide and Friends.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-source-and-capita...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-source-anti-patte...