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Bear is now source-available

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Bear is now source-available

#291

Post by bitwize »

ksec wrote: post #285
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..... >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 ha…

> 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.

Back when I was getting started in the mid-90s, GPL and LGPL were kind of the default. BSD and MIT were used for certain projects, like the BSDs and X11 of course, but the goal back then was to build up a large library of open source (then, "free software") as viable alternatives to proprietary software, and the GPL was the easiest way to do that and ensure it remained free.

It was the rise of Rails, and the attracting of commercial programmers and startup bros to open source in the '00s, that motivated the historical preference for BSD and MIT licenses.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#292

Post by zelphirkalt »

Aurornis wrote: post #276
swiftcoder wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it can happen, but ask the people maintaining open source projects long term, how much it helped them pass silly leetcode interviews, which companies insist must be done, even if you have a golden track record.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#293

Post by 1gn15 »

andoando wrote: post #180
KolmogorovComp wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So everything should be open source and no one should be able to write software to sell it? If you want your projects license agreement to be withheld in future projects there is a license for that. Its called copyleft

That would be great, actually. AGPL for everything.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#294

Post by 1gn15 »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #10
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…

It reads perfectly clear. It is designed to be a platform and mit license makes it too easy for other people to create competing services and they don’t want that. Maybe it was a mistake on their part to make it initially open source or it is bad that there are people looking to steal other people’s work

It's not possible to steal code, since the original author still has it.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#295

Post by zelphirkalt »

roncesvalles wrote: post #278
zelphirkalt wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Close-sourcing a previously open source project is like a deathwish for that project. Will meet much aversion, and if the project is important, people will fork whatever the last open source version was. Then you usually lost all cards and don't have a business at all.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#296

Post by zelphirkalt »

jaredklewis wrote: post #283
zelphirkalt wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

If it stays obscure, that isn't necessarily too bad. You respect your users and grant them the freedoms, if they seek them, but if not then that's their choice. It is merely geared against competitors taking and running, making a "better" (moaaar features) closed source version.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#297

Post by 38 »

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…

[dead]

Re: Bear is now source-available

#298

Post by lmm »

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…

> What Herman is doing is a service to us all, and we should find a term (better than 'source-available', which is cold and doesn't capture community projects accurately) that people can promote themselves under without much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

People are cold to source-available projects because of their experience of source-available projects. If you want to benefit from the warm reputation that open source has, you need to offer the things that open source offers. If you want to do some novel thing, that's fine, but your novel thing will have to earn its reputation.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#299

Post by kovac »

Thanks for the bear blog.

Considering how LLM companies don't respect licenses, and if your livelihood depends on it, I'd go a step further and only make the source available upon request, under strict agreements about how it's used.

There's a lot of "open-source" nowadays that has nothing to do with the spirit of hacking.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#300

Post by lmm »

sunshowers wrote: post #151
darkwater wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Did you know that there's a compelling legal argument that the GPL attaches to programs talking to each other via JSON data structures?

The GPL attaches to programs that are legally derivative works. So does any other license that doesn't explicitly grant the right to prepare and distribute derivative works, such as the overwhelming majority of commercial/proprietary licenses. The issue is with the overall copyright/legal system, not with the GPL specifically, and given that most entities are comfortable using at least some non-BSD programs it doesn't seem to worry people in practice.

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