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Bear is now source-available

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Bear is now source-available

#321

Post by bigstrat2003 »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #302
bitwize wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wha…

> 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.

Very well put! I personally believe that "freedom" must include the freedom to do anything you want with the software, even close off your fork if you choose. And I do not believe that a commercial project using my software harms anyone at all, as my project is still there, still available for all. Accordingly, I have always believed in and used permissive licenses. It has nothing to do with corporate profits, and I find it vexing that people make that bad faith assumption in discussions such as this.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#322

Post by subarctic »

It isn't obvious from the title or the blog post itself, but it looks like this is some blogging software called Bear, not Bear the markdown notes app for macos and ios, which as far as I know isn't open source anyway

Re: Bear is now source-available

#323

Post by torstenvl »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #50
ezekg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's the most abused license in the history of open source [0] [1]. [0]: https://keygen.sh/blog/weaponized-open-source/ [1]: https://keygen.sh/blog/whither-open-source/

What specifically is your problem with the AGPL? I read both of your links and while there are a lot of incisive statements ("But the truth is, the AGPL isn't used to increase user freedom — it's used to restrict it, primarily through its legal ambiguities") you never spell out why you believe them.

It is objectively true. AGPL does not meet the definition of free software, because it restricts the use of the software when modified.

The FSF pretends this isn't true by pretending that some uses are actually redistribution. However, this is too clever by half. Redistribution has a well-settled meaning, and allowing interaction over a network—unless it involves downloading the software itself—does not meet that definition.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#324

Post by lemming »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #320
lemming wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clea…

> if you went and volunteered for a highway cleanup, would you get mad if Bezos drove on the highway you cleaned?

No, but I would get mad if Bezos made a ton of money charging people to drive on a clean highway after I had cleaned it for free.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#325

Post by wavemode »

Aurornis wrote: post #274
bachmeier wrote: post #97

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, 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 thi…

Yeah, and all but one of those claims is incorrect.

"Open source" is not just a turn of phrase which became common over time. The phrase was coined by the founders of the Open Source Initiative, and it has always had a very specific meaning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative

People who seem to think that "open source" has a variety of meanings, are probably confusing it for "free software" which does indeed have a variety of meanings (which was the whole reason the phrase "open source" was created - because "free software" was too vague, and they wanted to create a term with a single, specific definition!)

Re: Bear is now source-available

#326

Post by duskwuff »

drob518 wrote: post #199
swiftcoder wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so clear the choice was made consciously. There's a big swing away from the GPL and towards MIT/BSD around the time that Apple starts adopting a bunch of open-source projects for inclusion in MacOS X, and it accelerates when various big companies announced that they would be forbidding GPLv3 adoption. Fast forward to the cloud provider era, and basically no new software is being placed under the GPL (at least…

The problem with GPL was "tainting." It was never clear in what cases you could use GPL without it dragging all your code into being freely available. LGPL was supposed to help with that; AGPL made it even worse. The lawyers were terribly confused and recommended you just not use anything with "GPL" in the license. The reason why MIT/BSD licenses flourished is that they were easy to understand. As long as you didn't…

GPL also gets incredibly ambiguous when it's applied to anything that isn't software written in a language like C for a personal computer. (What does "linking" even mean with respect to a Javascript library, for instance?)

Re: Bear is now source-available

#328

Post by keysdev »

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…

> And it used to be very cool if your OSS project get used by a big company, until it is not.

Working for big companies used to cool, but now they are just all EvilCorps.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#329

Post by 0xfffafaCrash »

NiloCK wrote: post #314

[flagged]

Have you considered that some people listen to text rather than read it? Do you think screen readers, non-native English speakers, or anyone else listening to these are able to reasonably differentiate between “Open Source” and “open source”?

Most readers won’t notice the difference or disregard it as meaningless and if you have to explain to everyone your position on a matter of communication it’s likely that you are the one who needs improvement with respect to your communication, not the rest of the world.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#330

Post by fastball »

hellcow wrote: post #40

I'm sad to see this. I supported Bear because it was open source. As that's no longer the case, I just canceled my membership. I would love to see this reversed and moved to AGPL instead.

What is the difference (to you) between open source and source available?
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