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Bear is now source-available

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Bear is now source-available

#281

Post by 360MustangScope »

dewey wrote: post #149
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.

How would GPL change the outcome?

A lot of people say that it can prevent these situations but from working for large enterprises, a lot of the offerings that are created literally don’t even change the code. Thus they have nothing to contribute and have no obligation to release any source code.

GPL also does not prevent the corporation from building software in front of whatever GPL service it is. Kind of like the Linux kernel, why bother changing the kernel when you can build software in front of it and not change anything and thus have nothing to release.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#282

Post by ajdude »

Why do people go with MIT over a GPL? Would have just releasing it under GPL in the first place also have prevented this?

Don't get me wrong, I have released libraries under MIT before because I have absolutely no problems with others using it even if they want to commercialize it, but I've also released things under GPL3.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#283

Post by jaredklewis »

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…

Sure, but you're skipping the first part where if you make your project AGPLv3 most users will just choose a different project doing the same thing but with an MIT license.

I agree that if you can somehow achieve widespread adoption with a copy left license (like Linux or Wordpress), then that will be better for you. But IME copyleft licenses are a major hurdle to widespread adoption, so such projects remain obscure.

I'm not saying it is a good thing, but I've never worked at a company where we were allowed to bring in copyleft dependencies (even though everything invariably runs on Linux, which is GPLv2).

Re: Bear is now source-available

#284

Post by echelon »

tsimionescu wrote: post #179
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

Amazon offers lots of AGPL software, and they fully respect the license in all cases. Ultimately the GPL is about protecting users' rights at the expense of developers' rights. So as long as AWS can offer a better/cheaper managed version of a software service, while still giving the users all details on how to run the same service if they chose to, then the AGPL is completely achieving its aims, even if the original…

> protecting users' rights at the expense of developers' rights.

Protecting the user's right to compete with the developer is not sustainable.

Protecting the user's right to run the software for free on their own or in their company so long as they don't resell it is perfectly salient and should be enough for anyone. That's really all the freedom a user needs.

If you're asking for more, it's because you want to take the developer's business. That's 100% unfair.

The hyperscalers aren't giving back 1/1,000,000th of what they've taken. Yet we go after "source available" or "fair source" like it's some grave evil.

Where is there opportunity left for software outside of the major trillion dollar companies if we don't start giving developers the benefit of profiting on their work?

I make a point to cheer on every fair source, source available, or open core project I see. It's the sustainable path forward. We shouldn't be taking from each other - we should be finding out how to take back from the hyperscalers.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#285

Post by ksec »

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.....

>The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses...

Interesting how the world have changed. The so called GPL preference, or GPL > GPLv3 > AGPL among Open source crowd is a recent thing. Arguably in the last 15 to 20 years. Both BSD and MIT dates back before GPL. And you will see far more people prefer BSD and MIT in the 90s and 00s.

I have also long argued that the license preference among generation has somewhat a linkage to political shift in spectrum. Likely to do with Tech, now known as Big tech taking advantage. And it used to be very cool if your OSS project get used by a big company, until it is not.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#286

Post by psionides »

jolux wrote: post #111
joshcsimmons wrote: post #110

Silly. Globally over half of smartphone users have Android phones. Bear was actually the only thing that kept me in the Apple ecosystem for so long, was really bummed when I switched to Android to have to move to another notes program. IMO - you are charging money for your app which makes you a business. When you don't listen to the market you forfeit any right to complain when you get your lunch money stolen. Sounds…

That’s a different product — bear.app. This is about bearblog.dev.

Honestly I was really confused about this too…

Re: Bear is now source-available

#287

Post by arp242 »

leakycap wrote: post #166
arp242 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different Bear. https://bear.app/ Which you could have known by spending five seconds on https://lambdalpha.com , or actually reading your own link which calls Bear an "Apple Design Award winner notes app", which doesn't really sound like the Bear blog. Stop spreading rampant misinformation.

Rampant? Isn't that a pretty extreme response to a mistaken link?

Well, it's edited now, but previously it contained strong accusations, and doubled down even stronger after someone else pointed out they're wrong.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#288

Post by nicoburns »

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 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

Is it not because corporations started funding open source projects in a big way (multiple billions of dollars a year big), and they fund projects that have licenses that they can use in their commercial projects.

To me that's a sign of the success of Open Source rather than the opposite.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#289

Post by iJohnDoe »

indigodaddy wrote: post #7

From their GitHub: Obviously you could self host it (and I guess plenty have figured out how to and even created competitors with the code if they are making this change?), but they discourage hobbyists from trying with this unhelpful statement. So what was the point of even being open source? Their whole statement kind of comes off as disingenuous to me because of this. "Bear Blog has been built as a platform and no…

This really confused the heck out of me. I thought Bear blog was really cool. I saw the GitHub link and had hopes to self-host. Then saw the note that it’s not possible to self-host and closed the tab and never looked back.

So this whole post on HN is confusing as heck.

Why post the code at all if you can’t self-host? But apparently you can self-host?!?

Well, I guess kudos to those that saw the note and downloaded the code anyways and tried to spin it up.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#290

Post by kstrauser »

Fordec wrote: post #189

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.

I like the Elastic License. It helps me know which programs to avoid.
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