That's kind of the point of MIT.
Bear is now source-available
401–410 of 509 posts
Re: Bear is now source-available
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now, no LLM is currently anywhere near doing that for ElasticSearch. You could probably feed all of ElasticSearch into an LLM and ask it to "reimplement it" successfully. But why would you even bother? There's already an existing open-source alternative called OpenSearch [1]. [1]: https://github.com/opensearch-project/opensearch
His point was that we are quickly entering the land of “Source Available” not really being a shield if someone’s willing to spend some time in claude code.
If you viewed the source and reproduced a software project you don't have a license to redistribute, that's cut and dry copyright violation. If the code looks similar enough you are toast. That's why there's the concept of a "clean room" reimplementation. The same is true if you feed the source into the context of an LLM and asked it to reproduce it. You have done nothing but introduce the possibility of transcription bugs.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#403Earlier 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…
> 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.
I remember the shitstorm Zed Shaw caused when he built something on top of MIT/BSD-licensed libraries and released it under GPL. "B-but that's against the spirit of the license!" people said.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#404Re: Bear is now source-available
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there any other maintainers? What happens when Herman Martinez is no longer able or willing to keep it going?
https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/ > This is a morbid topic for me to write about: what happens to Bear if something happens to me? I've got that covered too. There's a detailed succession plan in place, including: Full documentation of all systems and processes Multiple trusted developers with access to the codebase Clear instructions for maintaining the platform So if I were to be incapacitated in any way, the…
https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/graphs/contributo... paints a different story. Looks more like bus factor 1 + hopium.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
This point of view is new to me to be honest. Let's say I don't care about the intent of people choosing the AGPL (I do, I wish people did stuff for altruistic reasons, but the economical system in which we live makes it so we can't rely on this). You say people are choosing the AGPL because they think it lets them do effectively source-available while benefiting from open source washing. Fine. I don't like this. But…
> What's so bad with this? It's lying. It's an open source project and a business model built on deceit. I guess I care about clear rules, clear intentions, and I care about integrity above all. The AGPL is ambiguity; unclear rules, veiled intentions. And these same people will relicense without a thought, too. I think we should care about these things, otherwise we repeat history over and over again.
> veiled intentions
The intentions behind the AGPL were never veiled. The intent was to close the loophole in the GPL3 that is opened by providing software as a network service. If you were to release software that provides a network service under the GPL3, someone else could use and modify it without sharing their changes, but while also providing it as a service. AGPL3 closes this loophole by ensuring that everyone who can use the software must have access to the source including any changes. I don't see any deceit, and I don't even see any anti-competitiveness.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd have to agree with this stance. You choose MIT when you are happy to share your source with no strings attached. Some do pick MIT with this intent, but that was not the case here. But rather a case of either miscommunication or wanting to have the pie ("look how altruistic I am") and eating it too ("look how business-minded I am").
I mean, there’s a chance it’s exactly what he said, “I didn't give it much thought at the time, but knew that I wanted the code to be available for people to learn from, and to make it easily auditable so users could validate claims I have made about the privacy and security of the platform.” … it doesn’t have to be some to be some sort of nefarious OSS altruism, it really could be, “maybe people would want to see ho…
Possibly, but that would be pretty damning. A license isn't something you should YOLO. If he is that laissez-faire about licensing the source code then what other important aspects of the project has he not given sufficient thought.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#408I think the main contribution of Bear at first was centralizing and codifying a certain visual style: minimalistic, with a single narrow column. It's basically "the Medium layout, but indie". And the thing is, that style in itself is not copyrightable. To achieve it, you don't need to use bearblog. You just need a few tens of lines of CSS, which you can very easily write yourself.
Today there's another thing going for Bear: the discovery page. It's gradually becoming a driver of visibility, attracting more authors to Bear to get readers who are there. But I'm wary of these "flywheel" kind of things, even if they have an indie look. To me it still feels better to have my own website, and participate only in those discovery systems that support it, like Reddit or HN.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#409As 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…
My issue with "source available" as a term has always been that it basically sounds like a synonym to "open source". It's not clear to me why the place to draw the line for what level of restriction constitutes " would be between what's known as " source available" and "true" open source when the question of "can I read the source code for this or not" seems way more intuitive to me than "can I run a cloud-based software service for this without violating the terms of the license".
From what I can tell, the argument against including stuff that's called source available in the category of open source basically boils down to the OSI definition, but it doesn't seem reasonable to me for an organization to claim exclusive rights to a very generic-sounding term with an intuitive definition that clashes with how they want to define it. If there's a concern over the pollution of their brand, they should be trying to trademark it, and if there's not, the constant backlash against anyone using the term in a way that conflicts with their definition is pretty antisocial. I recognize that this battle is probably already lost, but I'm not sure I'll ever understand why as a community we seem to have been happy to police usage of an unintuitive definition through public pressure just to try to make a point that doesn't seem to have nearly as much consensus behind it as the expectation of uniformity would imply.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 def…
The extra network clause triggers on modification, not redistribution.
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