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Bear is now source-available

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Bear is now source-available

#421

Post by account42 »

lemming wrote: post #324
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The situation is more akin to Bezos charging people to deliver goods via your highway while others can still use it for free though.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#423

Post by hellcow »

cousin_it wrote: post #408

I 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 fo…

You can also participate in openring to provide that type of small-web discoverability to other authors you like: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#424

Post by xrd »

What is to prevent someone from cloning this code, and jumping into claude code and saying: "implement an identical system in Elixir?"

LLMs are great at translation from X programming language to Y programming language.

The Google/Oracle Android/Java lawsuit boiled down to whether Google engineers copied source code, or whether they re-implemented things in a clean room without using prior code, right?

Isn't using an LLM to rebuild something a great loophole for this elastic search license?

I see this being a losing battle because the license is only as strong as your ability to enforce it. Bear is probably in a good position because of their network position, but this seems like a losing battle long term.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#425

Post by rpgbr »

cousin_it wrote: post #408

I 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 fo…

As in https://github.com/knhash/jekyllBear

Re: Bear is now source-available

#426

Post by saghm »

SamInTheShell wrote: post #413
saghm wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 soft…

The history stems from the term “free” software not being very palatable for marketing. There are 4 tenants to free software. Bear is no longer free software.

All of those statements are reasonable, but they don't really change the point I'm making from what I can tell. Having trouble marketing "free software" doesn't justify anything about how an entirely separate term should be used.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#427

Post by aatd86 »

jaredklewis wrote: post #93
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…

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…

Understand your point, but I wouldn't be so sure. People also want to ensure that the software is being supported, the inevitable bugs being worked on, and not abandoned. It is more likely that a commercial project will be supported than a MIT licensed one. So there might not be as many github stars for such project, but on the other hand, as long as it feeds people, it will not disappear.

A MIT licensed project on the other hand, I personally consider like a potential liability more often than not. Not different from any piece of code I could find on stackoverflow. Not something that is serious. Even if it were tied to a big corpo, that would probably become fast unsupported.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#428

Post by franktankbank »

xrd wrote: post #424

What is to prevent someone from cloning this code, and jumping into claude code and saying: "implement an identical system in Elixir?" LLMs are great at translation from X programming language to Y programming language. The Google/Oracle Android/Java lawsuit boiled down to whether Google engineers copied source code, or whether they re-implemented things in a clean room without using prior code, right? Isn't using an…

What's preventing someone just ignoring the license?

Re: Bear is now source-available

#429

Post by account42 »

dinkleberg wrote: post #96
edu wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find amusing is that it's built on top of Django and of course uses a few other dependencies[0], and without them the project wouldn't even exist... 0. https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/master/requi...

That argument can be made for virtually every piece of software. We all build on top of the work of others.

It can and it should.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#430

Post by SamInTheShell »

saghm wrote: post #426
SamInTheShell wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history stems from the term “free” software not being very palatable for marketing. There are 4 tenants to free software. Bear is no longer free software.

All of those statements are reasonable, but they don't really change the point I'm making from what I can tell. Having trouble marketing "free software" doesn't justify anything about how an entirely separate term should be used.

I actually put this in the wrong thread. Disregard, I have no clue where the thread I meant to put that was.
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