Bear is now source-available • Hacker News Board

Re: Bear is now source-available

#301

Post by sunshowers » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 1:58 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #300

sunshowers wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 copyrigh…

Right, as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45096736, simply running GPL programs is probably fine. Input/output that doesn't establish "intimate communication" probably doesn't create a combined work, but "shipping complex data structures back and forth" does, according to the FSF.

There isn't a similar degree of legal risk with MPL 2.0, nor with non-copyleft licenses (which is the subject of this subthread, not proprietary licenses) -- whether or not a plugin counts as a combined work, there are no requirements on you.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#302

Post by frumplestlatz » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 2:06 AM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #291

ksec wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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, lik…

As a BSD developer from the 90s, that does not reflect my experience.

We wanted our code to be as widely used as possible. It’s really not any more complicated than that.

There was always tension between the folks that shipped GPL software and folks that shipped BSD/MIT software, but the dividing line was not whether or not we were “commercial programmers and startup bros”.

It has always come down to questions of what we believe freedom to mean, how we wanted to contribute utility to the world, and whether we saw the use of our software in commercial projects as a loss to ourselves in a zero sum game.

The rise of “software as a service” has changed that calculus for some, and disadvantaged those that sought to build commercial service entities around their open source software. In the areas that I work, it’s made no material difference.

As for Ruby on Rails, I think it’s outsized presence on hacker news might have given you an inaccurate picture of its influence on the broader open source ecosystem.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#303

Post by brundolf » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 2:22 AM UTC

I got this confused with the Bear note-taking app for a minute (https://bear.app/), since it's in a closely adjacent domain and even has similar value statements. Unfortunate naming collision

Re: Bear is now source-available

#304

Post by NiloCK » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 2:22 AM UTC

The updated license in the BearBlog repo (https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/master/LICEN...) doesn't seem to match the Elastic License very well (https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license).

Have I missed a different source for the license text?

Re: Bear is now source-available

#305

Post by lmm » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 2:22 AM UTC

sunshowers wrote: post #301

lmm wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 copyrigh…

Right, as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45096736 , simply running GPL programs is probably fine. Input/output that doesn't establish "intimate communication" probably doesn't create a combined work, but "shipping complex data structures back and forth" does, according to the FSF. There isn't a similar degree of legal risk with MPL 2.0, nor with non-copyleft licenses (which is the subject of this s…

> There isn't a similar degree of legal risk with MPL 2.0, nor with non-copyleft licenses (which is the subject of this subthread, not proprietary licenses)

There is a similar degree of legal risk with the overwhelming majority of licenses in use. Yes, using exclusively permissively-licensed software would let you avoid this particular risk - but given that essentially no-one (BSD advocates are, if anything, less scrupulous about avoiding proprietary software than GPL advocates - you rarely hear of BSD-land pushing firmware into a separate nonfree repository or the like) does that, it's clearly not a risk many people care much about.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#306

Post by indigodaddy » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 2:28 AM UTC

iJohnDoe wrote: post #289

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 th…

I had exactly the same reaction when I looked at the GitHub a few years ago. I was like, ok well that's weird, and didn't think about bearblog anymore

Re: Bear is now source-available

#307

Post by lemming » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 2:30 AM UTC

spongebobstoes wrote: post #51

open source is charity. I believe in it, I contribute to it, but I recognize it is unlikely to lead to a sustainable livelihood

I don't know about you, but if I'm going to donate to/work for charity, I'd like to ensure it's for someone who actually needs it rather than the Amazons of the world. I don't feel a pressing need to donate any money or time to them.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#308

Post by kamranjon » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 2:38 AM UTC

Does anyone know why this says "No javascript, no stylesheets, no trackers. Just your words."

But when you look at the github repo here: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog

It says the repo is 40% CSS and 31% Javascript? Am I misinterpreting what this means in this context?

Re: Bear is now source-available

#309

Post by jakelazaroff » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 2:43 AM UTC

kamranjon wrote: post #308

Does anyone know why this says "No javascript, no stylesheets, no trackers. Just your words." But when you look at the github repo here: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog It says the repo is 40% CSS and 31% Javascript? Am I misinterpreting what this means in this context?

If you click on the language name, GitHub should take you to a list of all files in that language in the repo. It looks like the JavaScript is basically all admin type stuff.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#310

Post by chowells » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 2:47 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #284

tsimionescu wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a very business-centric viewpoint. I publish a small number of open-source libraries. They are not a business. I have no interest in making them a business. In fact, the idea of making them a business is repellent. They're just code for doing some tasks more easily than starting from scratch.

I made some of them because I needed them, and had no reason to own them. I made some because I thought another library was poorly designed and I could demonstrate a better way. I didn't make any because I wanted money or recognition. I don't care who uses them, or how. It is literally impossible for a user to do anything with any of them that harms me.

I am deeply suspicious of any world view that declares it bad when people use code I have released for free. I released it so people would use it. Good for them!