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Bear is now source-available

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Bear is now source-available

#81

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

Nitpick but I accidentally upvoted the article (in the bearblog.dev website itself, the small upvote in the website)

and turns out once you upvote, you can't downvote?

Well, I love minimalist site providers Its license is AGPL which still technically falls under Open source as to what "OSI?" says.

Source available just have a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe my critique of them isn't based on good intentions but I feel like I am getting really restricted as a user by source available licenses. I understand the pain of developers trying to make money. I just think that AGPL is a better use case and even elastic search went back to agpl and a lot of these source available things are going to agpl

I am sure that big tech might be able to bypass agpl itself somehow and that's why there were things like sspl but I still think that agpl is one of the most rock solid copy left licenses.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#82

Post by jraph »

ezekg wrote: post #71
jraph wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I won't cry for corps big enough to have legal departments because they elected not to benefit from my software. They have too much power for me to worry about looking to accommodate them and their fantasy. I don't mind them not using my code. They are doing themselves here. They have the human power to rebuild it anyway and I actually believe it should cost them. it's actually them who are spreading the F…

My point is less about the AGPL license itself and more about the people who choose it. If the OSI came out and made a statement on the ambiguities in the AGPL, and cleared the FUD in such a way that all companies agreed and could reference it, I'd wager that the AGPL would over time become much, much less popular for commercial open source. But I'd wager that they won't do that, because they win when COSS wins. But…

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 the effect of this for me is that we actually get actual free software.

What's so bad with this?

I've reread your second text and didn't find what's actually bad with the AGPL.

Now, I wish all the FUD around AGPL was cleared; the FUD is what's bad, but I don't wan't to wait for this to happen before picking the AGPL for my software.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#83

Post by delichon »

jorams wrote: post #78
redwood wrote: post #15

It's great to see the open source crowd particularly in Europe is finally turning corner here. You know something's broken when Microsoft gets to claim to be the biggest backer of open source. Meanwhile they'll break your back and steal all your trust and credibility if they can

> You know something's broken when Microsoft gets to claim to be the biggest backer of open source. They can say whatever they want. They're just lying. If you spend even a little bit of time looking into it you'll find it's just a marketing strategy.

I spent a little time looking into it, and it turns out that Microsoft owns an outfit named GitHub, which apparently offers free hosting for open source projects and is used by a lot of open source software makers. And Microsoft has around 4k employees with contributions to OS projects on GitHub. So maybe "biggest" is a lie in light of their anti-OS efforts, but it is at least arguable. Can you propose a bigger one?

Re: Bear is now source-available

#84

Post by jraph »

gpm wrote: post #79
jraph wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and even if you like the idea, this is not dependable. How do you know, as a user, that you'll not end up in the jerk list tomorrow?

Presumably the license would, like practically all open source licenses, be irrevocable. You aren't guaranteed new versions will be issued under the same license (short of a contract saying otherwise, just like every other piece of open source software) but the existing license that did not list you as a jerk can't be revoked...

True, but that's still a risk that adds to the risk of the authors switching the license.

BTW, if the jerk list is tied to the license, if the project had external contributors, they all need to agree to add or remove someone from the list, like any license change…

Re: Bear is now source-available

#85

Post by gpm »

jraph wrote: post #84
gpm wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the license would, like practically all open source licenses, be irrevocable. You aren't guaranteed new versions will be issued under the same license (short of a contract saying otherwise, just like every other piece of open source software) but the existing license that did not list you as a jerk can't be revoked...

True, but that's still a risk that adds to the risk of the authors switching the license. BTW, if the jerk list is tied to the license, if the project had external contributors, they all need to agree to add or remove someone from the list, like any license change…

> BTW, if the jerk list is tied to the license, if the project had external contributors, they all need to agree to add [...] someone from the list, like any license change…

Not if you base this off a license like MIT that allows sublicensing under more restrictive terms (not a lawyer, not legal advice)

Re: Bear is now source-available

#86

Post by foxglacier »

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

Yes. Somebody else using your software is usually the ambition of open source developers but this guy is hurt by it. He's programming for money, not doing charity. It sounds like being open source was just for show to make his business look like a charity.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#87

Post by thayne »

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…

I don't know what the competing forks are, but it definitely doesn't seem like they are from a big megacorp like Amazon.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#88

Post by ezekg »

jraph wrote: post #82
ezekg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is less about the AGPL license itself and more about the people who choose it. If the OSI came out and made a statement on the ambiguities in the AGPL, and cleared the FUD in such a way that all companies agreed and could reference it, I'd wager that the AGPL would over time become much, much less popular for commercial open source. But I'd wager that they won't do that, because they win when COSS wins. But…

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.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#89

Post by arp242 »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #21
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…

Most people have no problem with non-open source software. The gnashing of teeth comes in when projects like Terraform become successful specifically because they're open source , and then the maintainer changes to a closed source license that would have prevented the project from being successful in the first place. Doubly so when they relicense outside contributors' work with a closed source license because those c…

Quite a few people commenting here are having problems with it in the case of Bearblog though, including some pretty wild accusations.

And lets be real here: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/graphs/contributo...

Looking at the details of that, the only two (small) substantial code changes from other people are "User can delete their own account" from 2020, and "Use cloudflare online dns api to perform domain check" from 2021.

Re: Bear is now source-available

#90

Post by ahartmetz »

gr4vityWall wrote: post #43
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…

> we should find a term (better than 'source-available' [...]) That term already exists: it's proprietary software. If you're going to restrict what users can do with their copies of the program, please do not try to label the program as Free Software / open-source.

Maximalism and lack of nuance aren't going to fix the world. Though, neither is lack of thinking things through. I'm not sure how people, including myself, would feel about the situation if the company using a "Bear-like" license was, say, Oracle or Microsoft.
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