Bear is now source-available
herman.bearblog.dev
Bear is now source-available
1–10 of 509 posts
Re: Bear is now source-available
#2I didn’t know this was a Django application. Love that. Totally understand the author’s point of view, too.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#3As 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-available', which is cold and doesn't capture community projects accurately) that people can promote themselves under without much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
EDIT from a comment in a thread way down, that summarises my point:
I argue that the natural winner-take-all dynamics of the marketplace are not beneficial to the the mission of free and open source software. In fact, having no safeguard against large organisations making money this way is actually hugely detrimental to the mission by enabling these companies to ensnare unsuspecting users in a web of both their own proprietary software as well as all that free and open source software has to offer.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#4I suppose this is the move if you're looking to foreclose all possible competing usages. Kudos for using correct terminology as it is no longer Open Source.
However, I still believe AGPL is a better alternative in most cases and functionally prevents large enterprises from touching your code due to typical internal policies.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#5As 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
Isn't this what the AGPL is for? That's an OSI approved "open source" license that places restrictions on people making the software accessible as a network service.
Re: Bear is now source-available
#6It's always sad when someone removes their project from the free software world.
I'd like to comment further on the permissive license point:
> When I started building Bear I made the code available under an MIT license. I didn't give it much thought at the time
I suspect many people choosing permissive licenses do it in the same spirit. They don't give much thoughts about the license, they just want to share the code with others (which is very nice!), and there was a push some years ago to make permissive licenses the default in many ecosystems (this is not innocent, by the way).
For me, the first lesson from this blog post is: think hard about what you want to really allow.
Given what the author says later:
> It hurts to see something you've worked so hard on for so long get copied and distributed with only a few hours of modification
The permissive license was obviously a bad choice. Not blaming, of course, hindsight is 20/20.
Pick permissive licenses if you are okay to work for free for other entities, and if you are cool with the potential asymmetry of them not sharing their improvements.
I'll preach for my church: when you release something, please consider a strong copyleft license. If it's SaaS, consider AGPL. It still allows people to provide services with your work, but if they need to improve your code, they are required to redistribute the improvements to their users. I don't see many reasons, in most cases, to allow people to get your code and not do the same as you: provide the code to their users; that's unfair to both their users and yourself (a notable exception is if you want to push/promote a format or a standard - then you want to push adoption at "all" costs).
Most of the times, this means you can get these improvements back. By sharing free software under AGPL, it is still possible that you'll work for free for someone else. But at least, you'll be competing on more equal footing. They'll actually need to work to be better than you.
In both cases, your advantage over them is your expertise in your own stuff.
A side effect of the AGPL is that big corps are afraid of it, so you will likely not get competition from them (even though AGPL allows them to do so).
Re: Bear is now source-available
#7From their GitHub:
Obviously you could self host it (and I guess plenty have figured out how to and even created competitors with the code if they are making this change?), but they discourage hobbyists from trying with this unhelpful statement. So what was the point of even being open source? Their whole statement kind of comes off as disingenuous to me because of this.
"Bear Blog has been built as a platform and not as an individual blog generator. It is more like Substack than Hugo. Due to this it isn't possible to individually self-host a Bear Blog."
Re: Bear is now source-available
#8As 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…
[deleted]
Re: Bear is now source-available
#9Has the maintainer looked at fair source? [0] I believe it's superior to source-available (and open core), because it eventually becomes fully open source under DOSP [1], which is great for free and paid users, especially for a blog platform like Bear. There's an FCL [2] fair source license, which aligns pretty well with their current Bear Blog License (namely the non-compete and license key bits from the ELv2). All in all, the term "source-available" is pretty meaningless, because there are too many variables. Fair source tries to tighten that up.
It also aligns quite well with Bear's manifesto [3]. Even if Bear PTY LTD ceases to exist, Bear won't. This can be codified under DOSP.
Disclaimer: I'm involved with fair source and helped write the FCL.
[0]: https://fair.io
[1]: https://opensource.org/dosp
[2]: https://fcl.dev
Re: Bear is now source-available
#10From their GitHub: Obviously you could self host it (and I guess plenty have figured out how to and even created competitors with the code if they are making this change?), but they discourage hobbyists from trying with this unhelpful statement. So what was the point of even being open source? Their whole statement kind of comes off as disingenuous to me because of this. "Bear Blog has been built as a platform and no…
It reads perfectly clear. It is designed to be a platform and mit license makes it too easy for other people to create competing services and they don’t want that.
Maybe it was a mistake on their part to make it initially open source or it is bad that there are people looking to steal other people’s work