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Bear is now source-available

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Bear is now source-available

#311

Post by phkahler »

PhilippGille wrote: post #279
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.

And IIRC you can convert from MPL to GPL?

Re: Bear is now source-available

#312

Post by phkahler »

themerone wrote: post #122
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.

MIT & BSD don't include a patent grant, that's a good reason to go with the Apache license.

The Apache license is IMO ok in isolation. But its good to minimize the number of licenses used to enable sharing of code between programs. I also have a serious dislike of the Apache Foundation for their continued "support" of the joke that is OpenOffice and its trademark. That is such a disservice to open source and Free Software that I boycott them.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#316

Post by sgc »

LeFantome wrote: post #222
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

As I recall, Open Source was about developers collaborating to make better software. It was a pro-developer philosophy vs the Free Software movement which was all about the rights of users (and developer hostile in my view). GPL and its children are from the Free Software Tradition. Open Source provides the same “4 freedoms” as Free Software so most Open Source licenses qualify as Free Software as well. If the goal i…

I often think the solution is to move away from crafting a perfect ideology to encapsulate in your license, and just throw out some numbers. If you make more than N* the median income of this or that place, you can't use this software for free (whether that means licensing fees, code contribution, etc can vary). Let the smaller fish grow. If they get big enough, they can give back.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#317

Post by echelon »

chowells wrote: post #310
echelon wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 librar…

To be clear: I am not talking this kind of open source.

Rather, full-time commitment to software of scale. Software that does have business use cases. Software where outages can cost money.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#318

Post by bigstrat2003 »

andrewshadura wrote: post #133
adastra22 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Free software” means copyleft. The free software foundation manages copyleft licenses. The term open source was explicitly coined to differentiate from the more restrictive free software / copyleft. All free software licenses are open source licenses. Not all open source licenses are free software licenses.

This statement is incorrect.

Indeed it is, but can people please not abuse the flag function for such cases? It's not against the rules to be mistaken, and "flag" is not supposed to be a super downvote.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#319

Post by bigstrat2003 »

NoahZuniga wrote: post #94
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…

Well, many developers publish their code not because they want to specifically make a successful open source project, but because they made something that was useful to themselves, and like the idea behind open source. In that case it makes more sense to do a copyleft license because it will legally require all derivatives to also follow that open source idea.

> In that case it makes more sense to do a copyleft license because it will legally require all derivatives to also follow that open source idea.

That is a matter of opinion. I have put out some open source stuff under the form you mentioned, and it's always BSD or another permissive license. I view it as quite wrong to force my moral choices upon others, so I give others the freedom to use whatever license they like. In my case, that is what makes sense because of my own moral convictions.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#320

Post by bigstrat2003 »

lemming wrote: post #307
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.

That makes no sense at all. Software is not a scarce resource, unlike your money. If you donate money to a charity who gives it to Amazon, you would have good reason to be upset. But if you write a piece of software and Amazon uses it, other (needier) users benefit just as much!

Or to put it in another context, if you went and volunteered for a highway cleanup, would you get mad if Bezos drove on the highway you cleaned? Because that is what your position here is analogous to, and that seems like a poor line of reasoning to me.

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