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Bear is now source-available

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Bear is now source-available

#271

Post by jefftk »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #26
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.

> With the AGPL, Bear's competition can offer the software as as service if they publish the source code they are deploying. Technically true, but in practice almost every tech company forbids GPL code. I bet if you re-read your employment contract closely you'll find that you agreed not to introduce any GPL code into the company's codebases. (Edited for clarity).

I was at a FANG until 2022, and we were allowed to introduce GPL code into the monorepo. There were policies on how to do it correctly, but definitely not prohibited.

(AGPL, however, was nearly impossible to get permission to use)

Re: Bear is now source-available

#272

Post by theamk »

vova_hn wrote: post #241
zitterbewegung wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use the MIT license when the AGPL is the better choice? I don’t understand why developers choose MIT and or Apache license and then figure out that they now have a competitor cloning their product .

A lot of people are scared of GPL and other copyleft licenses, mostly because of how most big corporations treat GPL. Also, MIT license in particular is much shorter and easier to understand for a non-lawyer, than most other software licenses.

I suspect that any corporation that prohibit GPL will prohibit BearLicence as well. Those usually have a list of approved licenses.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#273

Post by Aurornis »

_puk wrote: post #209
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…

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…

> A commitment that this license will not change, even by the original author

Unless you’re entering into a contract with the project maintainer (which you’re not, if you’re just downloading or using it) then such a commitment means nothing.

Applying an open source license to your work means you’ve licensed other people to use it under those terms.

You can make all the commitments you want in the license, but it doesn’t actually commit you to keeping all future work open source as well under the law.

So you could write this license and make the commitment, but if you changed your mind later and decided not to open source future commits to the project that you made then nobody could stop you. Not unless you had entered into a contractual agreement with them and exchanged some consideration (money).

Re: Bear is now source-available

#274

Post by Aurornis »

bachmeier wrote: post #97
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, 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…

> If you aren't interested in open source, that's your option, but open source has had a clear meaning for decades.

If I’ve learned anything from reading HN comments, it’s that “open source” means different things to different people, including those who believe themselves to have specific knowledge of the history of the topic.

There are half a dozen different claims about the original meaning of “open source” in this comment section alone. They’re coming from people citing history and notable figures from open source past.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#275

Post by Aurornis »

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?

> 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

Are you kidding? This is the dream scenario for many open source projects: Getting adopted by a major company is a claim to fame like none other.

> 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?

Then don’t? You don’t have to do anything. It’s fine to ignore it you want.

Practically speaking, Amazon engineers aren’t going to sit around and hope the maintainer fixes the thing that unblocks them. If they actually need it, they’ll fix it. They might fork it. They might try to recruit the person.

But nothing obligates you to do anything. This hand-wringing about the idea that someone might find the project useful enough to identify issues and report them is rather ridiculous. Just ignore it if that’s prerogative.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#276

Post by Aurornis »

swiftcoder wrote: post #177
jaredklewis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly haven't seen many open-source maintainers convert a BigTech downstream into recurring revenue. I'm sure it does happen, but its far from the norm

If your project gets adopted by Big Tech then your market rate as an engineer just went way up.

It’s a huge badge of honor and a rare accomplishment. You’re thinking too directly if you can’t imagine how having your OSS project adopted by Big Tech isn’t a career boost.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#277

Post by jwitthuhn »

kelnos wrote: post #188
passthejoe wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "as a paid service" just "as a service". The license does not allow me to stand up a Bear instance and let people blog on it for free.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#278

Post by roncesvalles »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #203
jaredklewis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

None of the limitations of open-source licenses apply to the authors themselves. (author = the person or organization whose name appears in the copyright notice). I.e., you can have a MIT/GPL/AGPL licensed project, but have a "premium" fork/derivation/later-version of it that's completely closed source.

I actually see this as a valuable incentive to open-sourcing under MIT -- if a commercial provider of your software emerges, it will help you test/prove that a commercial market for your software exists, after which point you can completely close-source it and pivot to purely commercial competition.

Open-sourcing, then, is basically baiting the waters to see if anyone sees commercial potential in your work. And the minute that's validated, you get funding and start your company.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#279

Post by PhilippGille »

phkahler wrote: post #77

Naive. Guy picks a license that allow anyone to do anything they want with his code. Later realizes that was not appropriate when he's trying make money. Changes to an obscure license that on the surface seems to fix the problem. Your options are: MIT / BSD, GPL, LGPL, AGPL. All others are unnecessary and create needless incompatibility.

I think the MPL is a useful license as well, and underrated/underused.

It's less viral than the GPLs when just using the licensed work, and less permissive than MIT / BSD because changes have to be open sourced, when the program using the changed library is distributed.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#280

Post by shakna »

cinericius wrote: post #17
omnicognate wrote: post #5

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 Isn't this what the AGPL is for? That's an OSI approved "open source" license that places restrictions on people making the software accessible as a network service.

Not a lawyer, but my understanding is there is a strong feeling that AGPL can be roughly ignored if a service provider provides some level of indirection (e.g. a proxy) between the user and the software. Then, the software is somehow not being accessed over a network and thus they are not required to release the source.

Not just a level of indirection. The "substantial features" of the code need to not be directly exposed.

So if you had some AGPL OCR tool you were using, you could use it, but not in a way the user sees that text. Generate audio from it and expose the sound? Probably fine.

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