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Bear is now source-available

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Bear is now source-available

#371

Post by Medea »

maronato wrote: post #237
alberth wrote: post #220

> You may not provide the Software as a hosted or managed service that offers users access to substantial features or functionality. IANAL, but does the above limitation prevent users from hosting bear for their own (or your company’s own) needs? If so, doesn’t that defeat the whole reason why it’s MIT licensed. https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/master/LICEN...

People and companies can host it for personal/internal use. People and companies cannot host it and offer it as a service to other people or companies. https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license/faq

But he chose not to use the exact wording from the Elastic Search license, which clearly says "third parties." Instead, he wrote his own license, and now it is not clear if I am allowed to self-host. In my opinion that is a bad decision.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#372

Post by swiftcoder »

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 in specific fields this is true, but a lot of folks in Big Tech view open source as where developers who couldn't hack the interviews end up (they also hold a pretty similar view of startup engineers, unless they are ex-FAANG)

Re: Bear is now source-available

#373

Post by anktor »

sgc wrote: post #316
LeFantome wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would that ever be enforced? Do you not run into WinRAR/Sublime problem of "ey you've been using this, pay us, please"?

Re: Bear is now source-available

#374

Post by saubeidl »

LeFantome wrote: post #230
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…

Agreed. The AGPL does not care at all about those writing the code. It is all about users.

The AGPL makes it so those users can be the same ones as the ones writing code.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#376

Post by account42 »

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…

> 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.

You don't get to just redefine terms if you find them inconvenient and people are right to push back against such attempts. If you want something else, put in the work to get mind share for your model instead of trying to catch a free ride by taking over an established one.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#377

Post by account42 »

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…

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

It's only unsustainable when you are interested in keeping "user" and "developer" as distinct sets.

> 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.

No we are going after it when people try to pass it off as open source when it really isn't.

I like open source because it means I'm not beholden to the original developer in any way as long as I pay it forward. I'm OK if this means you can't find a profitable business model.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#379

Post by RicoElectrico »

FinnKuhn wrote: post #378
RicoElectrico wrote: post #375

I am confused, Bear appears to make no money as the hosting is free. So this is about hurt ego, not any financial loss.

He is very much making money with it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38937143 I suspect it is now probably more than in 2024.

Apparently this holds true today as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38937425

Re: Bear is now source-available

#380

Post by account42 »

duskwuff wrote: post #326
drob518 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

It's only unclear if you are trying to skirt the spirit of the GPL.

People who aren't trying to get freebies from he commons without paying back never had a problem with the GPL.

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