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Bear is now source-available

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Bear is now source-available

#201

Post by rincebrain »

swiftcoder wrote: post #175
jibal wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I'm not so clear the choice was made consciously. There's a big swing away from the GPL and towards MIT/BSD around the time that Apple starts adopting a bunch of open-source projects for inclusion in MacOS X, and it accelerates when various big companies announced that they would be forbidding GPLv3 adoption. Fast forward to the cloud provider era, and basically no new software is being placed under the GPL (at least…

(All personal opinion, etc.)

I'm not actually sure what a better way to square the circle of not making the large entities that have developed a weird patronage relationship with open source projects run away while also avoiding the kinds of problem that the GPLv3 and AGPL are hoping to deal with, would be. Limiting the virality scope might be beneficial there, but I'm not sure how you would word that in a way that's not gameable.

It feels like we've wound up in a weird position where because so many GPLv2 projects moved to GPLv3, companies were startled into paying attention to the risks involved in a new license with open questions about how it would shake out in actual courts, as well as being jolted to the very real possibility it could happen again, and took the path of risk reduction by moving toward platforms where that couldn't happen.

You might compare it to everyone pointing to Solaris's source closing as a reason to not trust Oracle about MySQL's license remaining GPLv2. (As it turned out, so far, they haven't changed the license, but there was certainly a lot of fearmongering about that at the time.)

So I think I agree that it's not so much a coordinated effort to steer anything as the direct effects of companies avoiding funding that space, as well as the knock-on effect that anyone whose goals involve large companies using their product and leveraging that avoids picking a license that precludes that in turn.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#202

Post by moralestapia »

rozab wrote: post #160
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 critic…

I guess Herman cried to his friends for help now. Pathetic.

Your evidence is solid, after all, it was the same guy who wrote that just a few months ago.

That post might be gone soon, "smaht" people are inclined to rewrite history to fit their current mood.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#203

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

I disagree. It will be harder to monetize MIT licensed projects, because any competitor can just grab and run. With AGPLv3, at least legally the competitor needs to publish their modifications as well. This in turn makes it more likely the competitor will not use your code, or if they do, in accordance with the license, which would be fine, and users of the product you build will mostly not care, because they don't even know what the licenses are about.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#205

Post by BrenBarn »

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…

Agreed. There was similar discussion around "the free and open web" on this thread some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066258

I think some people lose sight of the difference between the theoretical possibility of competing forks/implementations/services and the practical possibility. If a big enough organization gets ahold of something and begins to drive it, the fact that it's nominally open source may not be enough to ensure that people have a practical ability to get out from under that organization. In other words you need not just openness of "information" but actual open space to maneuver in the real world of food and money and markets and so on.

In many cases for-profit companies have taken up (or created) open source tools and made use of them in ways that still benefited the community at large. But it's not clear to me that FOSS licenses as we know them actually guarantee that. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to want to build safeguards against open source software being weaponized or co-opted for unfree purposes.

One thing that's not clear from the Bearblog dev's post is whether he would be open to small-scale "competitors" who share an ethos similar to his own. In theory such competitors could be granted special license exceptions. If I were in his position I could see myself wanting to exclude big companies (and companies that hope to become big) while allowing small operators. The challenge is to create an enforceable license that encodes that, rather than requiring the author to manually approve or deny each request.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#206

Post by rafram »

cxr wrote: post #76
ahartmetz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought so, too, at first. But there's a crucial difference: With the AGPL, Bear's competition can offer the software as as service if they publish the source code they are deploying. With the Bear license, Bear's competition just cannot offer the software as a service. It feels mostly in the spirit of FOSS to me, but Stallman would disagree. He has made it clear that there should be no restrictions on use.

> It feels mostly in the spirit of FOSS to me From the license at https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/998e87263248... >: " You may not provide the Software as a hosted or managed service that offers users access to substantial features or functionality " Given that the exclusive purpose of the Software in question is to implement a managed service for its users' hosting needs, I'm having trouble understan…

It’s saying that you can use Bear for your own blog, but you can’t launch a service that hosts other people’s blogs using it.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#208

Post by jraph »

ezekg wrote: post #88
jraph wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point of view is new to me to be honest. Let's say I don't care about the intent of people choosing the AGPL (I do, I wish people did stuff for altruistic reasons, but the economical system in which we live makes it so we can't rely on this). You say people are choosing the AGPL because they think it lets them do effectively source-available while benefiting from open source washing. Fine. I don't like this. But…

> What's so bad with this? It's lying. It's an open source project and a business model built on deceit. I guess I care about clear rules, clear intentions, and I care about integrity above all. The AGPL is ambiguity; unclear rules, veiled intentions. And these same people will relicense without a thought, too. I think we should care about these things, otherwise we repeat history over and over again.

> It's lying.

I don't see how it can do this. The AGPL is a license text. It states what people can do with the licensed code. What is lying in this text?

> I guess I care about clear rules, clear intentions, and I care about integrity

Me too

> The AGPL is ambiguity; unclear rules, veiled intentions

That's where I don't agree: The rules are written in the license text and I see no ambiguity there. Where is the ambiguity in the AGPL text? What is not clear about it? What granted rights are we not sure about?

> veiled intentions

The original intent of the AGPL authors (the FSF) was clear and simple to me: ensure the end user's freedom. It was GPL, but address the SaaS situation where someone can modify networked GPL software, make users use it from the network, without having to redistribute the modification since the program runs remotely and not on the user's machine. And that intent is perfectly align with what I want for my code.

Sure, people with bad intents will use the AGPL, and so what?

People kill with knives, but I'll definitely keep cooking with mine. The AGPL is a tool. It doesn't, by itself, has intents, especially veiled intents.

I'm not going to stop using the AGPL because someone wants to use it to trap users.

This is all abstract, I'd appreciate concrete examples where:

- people have done that, without a CLA (because yeah, I'm convinced AGPL+CLA can be bad).

- the AGPL doesn't work well for someone using it with the original intent in which the AGPL was written.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#209

Post by _puk »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #21
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…

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…

Sounds like we need a "forever open source" license.

A commitment that any significant derivative retain the original (or some later version) of the original license.

"Free to do whatever as long as it retains this license. A commitment that this license will not change, even by the original author".

No special cases, just a blanket license for all derivatives.

If it exists, what are the barriers to adoption? Why don't we all use it?

Re: Bear is now source-available

#210

Post by anikom15 »

zimpenfish wrote: post #181
swiftcoder wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No, open source was definitely more leaning toward the GPLv2 than the BSD-style licenses.
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