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-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.

• swiftcoder

  yesterday at 6:19 PM

  > the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd

  The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing.

  The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals

  • jwr

    today at 12:40 PM

    > The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals

    As a counterpoint, when I make something open source, I really mean "freedom", which includes the freedom to build a commercial service using the software. I use the MIT license not because of "corporate interests to undermine free software ideals", but because I really want the software to be free as in freedom.

    GPL, GPLv3, AGPL and similar license actually restrict the freedom to do anything you want with the software. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with it, just that "free software ideals" could mean different things to different people, and there might not be any "corporate interests".

  • tsimionescu

    yesterday at 7:01 PM

    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 company goes out of business.

    • LeFantome

      yesterday at 8:42 PM

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

      • saubeidl

        today at 9:41 AM

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

    • echelon

      yesterday at 11:42 PM

      > 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 the developer's business. That's 100% unfair.

      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.

      Where is there opportunity left for software outside of the major trillion dollar companies if we don't start giving developers the benefit of profiting on their work?

      I make a point to cheer on every fair source, source available, or open core project I see. It's the sustainable path forward. We shouldn't be taking from each other - we should be finding out how to take back from the hyperscalers.

      • chowells

        today at 2:47 AM

        This is a very business-centric viewpoint. I publish a small number of open-source libraries. They are not a business. I have no interest in making them a business. In fact, the idea of making them a business is repellent. They're just code for doing some tasks more easily than starting from scratch.

        I made some of them because I needed them, and had no reason to own them. I made some because I thought another library was poorly designed and I could demonstrate a better way. I didn't make any because I wanted money or recognition. I don't care who uses them, or how. It is literally impossible for a user to do anything with any of them that harms me.

        I am deeply suspicious of any world view that declares it bad when people use code I have released for free. I released it so people would use it. Good for them!

        • echelon

          today at 3:21 AM

          To be clear: I am not talking this kind of open source.

          Rather, full-time commitment to software of scale. Software that does have business use cases. Software where outages can cost money.

      • account42

        today at 9:57 AM

        > 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.

      • pabs3

        today at 7:09 AM

        Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation:

        https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...

        The hyperscalers are contributors to FOSS, both in code contributions and funding. They could easily far better though.

      • tsimionescu

        today at 6:52 AM

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

        I agree with you, actually - but Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement more generally really don't. They exactly and explicitly believe this right exists and should ideally be a legal right, and the AGPL quite explicitly maintains this right.

        Ultimately the Free Software movement is predicated on the concept that ideas can't be owned. They generally oppose both copyright and patents, and not just for software. Their licenses are meant as a stop gap solution. Ideally to them, or at least to some of the more die-hard members, laws would be changed such that what the GPL grants would not be a license predicated on copyright, but instead a legal requirement for all software, while copyright would be entirely abolished.

        In addition to their general opposition to copyright and patents, Free Software people also view software as having a special role in terms of privacy and control - that, even more so than books and other copyrightable works, you have a right to know what the software in your house and business is doing, and to modify and fix it if it's doing something you don't like. This is related to privacy rights on one hand, and also anti-monopoly, right to repair concepts on the other hand.

        This is all very different from the Open Source movement, even though they basically use the same kinds of licenses. The OpenSource movement is more of an industry group that believes competing on building much foundational software is a waste of resources. Instead, they believe the best way to build this foundational software is in collaboration with other commercial or non-commercial entities, building it in the open such that all may benefit from contributions and add their own contributions. However, the Open Source movement is completely fine with, and even expects, then making a proprietary product on top of this open source base.

        To them copyleft licenses are a tool to make sure others don't keep their improvements for themselves, but have the downside of making it harder to build your proprietary stuff on top. Conversely, software that takes your contributions but then doesn't allow you to use it in commercial offerings is completely unacceptable, since the whole goal of the movement is for different companies to build a common infra on which they can then build their own commercial products.

        Ultimately, both the Free Software and the Open Source movements will agree that a core part of open source is that anyone should be able to compete on delivering the original software, even if for entirely different ideological reasons.

  • LeFantome

    yesterday at 8:08 PM

    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 is developer collaboration, permissive licenses are often the best choice. If you want maximum user entitlement, copyleft licenses limit developer freedom in exchange for a guarantee that future code will also be released as free software.

    Cloud hosting was a challenge that did not exist when either philosophy first emerged.

    With hosting, you are able to become the preferred source for software without adding much value to the code itself. This is what the author is complaining about.

    The AGPL tries to address this in the GPL family but I don’t think it quite gets there. For permissive licenses, we see these “no hosting” exceptions.

    If you read the early writings from the Free Software Foundation, they do not care if devs can make a living. The goal is user freedom. I think it is this philosophy that objects to the hosting exceptions.

    Perhaps a better solution will be found in the future.

    • sgc

      today at 3:15 AM

      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.

      • anktor

        today at 9:30 AM

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

  • zimpenfish

    yesterday at 7:05 PM

    > The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing.

    Not wanting to further widen the schism but wasn't that the free software people rather than the open source people? cf [0], particularly the "not as strict" part.

    > In the late 1990's Eric Raymond and others developed the term "open source" as a more business friendly term than "free software", with a more inclusive meaning where licenses that were not as strict about the passing on of modifications would also quality for the term.

    [0] https://www.freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Eric_...

    • yesterday at 7:54 PM

    • anikom15

      yesterday at 7:52 PM

      No, open source was definitely more leaning toward the GPLv2 than the BSD-style licenses.

      • apgwoz

        yesterday at 7:59 PM

        …until businesses decided that the GPLv2 was legally risky and businesses started to avoid it.

        • graemep

          yesterday at 8:34 PM

          Software businesses. Other businesses do not care.

  • ksec

    today at 12:15 AM

    >The original stance of the open source crowd.....

    >The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses...

    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.

    I have also long argued that the license preference among generation has somewhat a linkage to political shift in spectrum. Likely to do with Tech, now known as Big tech taking advantage. And it used to be very cool if your OSS project get used by a big company, until it is not.

    • keysdev

      today at 5:06 AM

      > And it used to be very cool if your OSS project get used by a big company, until it is not.

      Working for big companies used to cool, but now they are just all EvilCorps.

      • sterlind

        today at 8:15 AM

        I think the companies themselves changed. Google used to be much less evil.

    • bitwize

      today at 1:01 AM

      > 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, like the BSDs and X11 of course, but the goal back then was to build up a large library of open source (then, "free software") as viable alternatives to proprietary software, and the GPL was the easiest way to do that and ensure it remained free.

      It was the rise of Rails, and the attracting of commercial programmers and startup bros to open source in the '00s, that motivated the historical preference for BSD and MIT licenses.

      • frumplestlatz

        today at 2:06 AM

        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 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.

        The rise of “software as a service” has changed that calculus for some, and disadvantaged those that sought to build commercial service entities around their open source software. In the areas that I work, it’s made no material difference.

        As for Ruby on Rails, I think it’s outsized presence on hacker news might have given you an inaccurate picture of its influence on the broader open source ecosystem.

        • orthoxerox

          today at 11:30 AM

          > 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.

        • popalchemist

          today at 6:54 AM

          Yep. This tinfoil conspiracy theory about these licenses being a scheme by VC backed startups is insane. Only a relative newbie to the scene could fall for that narrative. If you've been on the scene for 15-20 years, you know this is just the ethos, and these various licenses arose out of specific needs, but not opposing ideologies.

        • bigstrat2003

          today at 3:46 AM

          > 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.

          Very well put! I personally believe that "freedom" must include the freedom to do anything you want with the software, even close off your fork if you choose. And I do not believe that a commercial project using my software harms anyone at all, as my project is still there, still available for all. Accordingly, I have always believed in and used permissive licenses. It has nothing to do with corporate profits, and I find it vexing that people make that bad faith assumption in discussions such as this.

    • watwut

      today at 6:24 AM

      > And it used to be very cool if your OSS project get used by a big company, until it is not.

      Yup. Open source advocates would brag about adoption in enterprise. They would incessantly argue about how safe open source is compared to close source and would constantly complain about stupid managers not allowing open source.

      Not all of them, but that stance was predominant when I was younger.

  • nicoburns

    today at 12:48 AM

    > The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals

    Is it not because corporations started funding open source projects in a big way (multiple billions of dollars a year big), and they fund projects that have licenses that they can use in their commercial projects.

    To me that's a sign of the success of Open Source rather than the opposite.

  • gr4vityWall

    yesterday at 7:12 PM

    > The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing.

    Expanding on this, the Free Software movement always focused on freedom for users - which, in a world where copyright applies to computer programs, ultimately leads to the licenses you listed to repurpose it.

    The Open Source movement usually tries to advocate for open-source as the best development model. As in, writing it in the open and contributing with other people will result in objectively better software in the long term. Others treated it (when the term was coined) as a marketing term for Free Software, making it more palatable to businesses whose people running it don't want to talk about ethics too much.

    https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

  • Zambyte

    yesterday at 7:22 PM

    The original stance of open source is to cater to "free-riding" businesses. That's like, why the term "open source" even exists. You're thinking of the "free software" crowd.

  • jen20

    yesterday at 7:55 PM

    > The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing.

    s/open source/free software/

    None of those licenses prevent Amazon-style freeloading though.

    • account42

      today at 10:12 AM

      Amazon isn't freeloading anymore than users hosting the software themselves. They are providing a service and getting paid for that. This is only a problem for the original creator because they would rather get paid for the service himself but that desired vendor lock in was never something compatible with an open source license that ensures user freedom.

  • jibal

    yesterday at 6:28 PM

    The MIT and BSD licenses predated the GPL. People have a choice as to which ethic to follow ... it's not the result of a corporate conspiracy. (And I'm a social democrat, not a corporate simp.)

    • swiftcoder

      yesterday at 6:57 PM

      I'm not so clear the choice was made consciously. There's a big swing away from the GPL and towards MIT/BSD around the time that Apple starts adopting a bunch of open-source projects for inclusion in MacOS X, and it accelerates when various big companies announced that they would be forbidding GPLv3 adoption. Fast forward to the cloud provider era, and basically no new software is being placed under the GPL (at least in part because Amazon/Google/Facebook/etc are predicating contributions on being GPL-free)

      • drob518

        yesterday at 7:28 PM

        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 sue the original author or try to claim the code was written by you, you were free to do almost anything with it, including mixing it in with other for-profit code.

        Whether that's an abomination or a blessing depends on your corporate vs. free software politics.

        • duskwuff

          today at 4:25 AM

          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?)

          • account42

            today at 10:08 AM

            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.

          • pabs3

            today at 7:51 AM

            Just think about the goals of the GPL (software freedom for users), and its easy to see what you should do. Make it practical for a user to obtain and modify the source form (non-minified, non-transpiled, non-concatenated TypeScript/JavaScript/etc) of the library, build the version ran by the web browser, and replace the original with their modified version. Source maps can make part of that easier too. Progressive enhancement helps. Clean frontend/backend separation helps.

            • duskwuff

              today at 8:11 AM

              The "goals" of the license are irrelevant. What matters from a legal perspective is the text of the license, and every time that text sets legal conditions which reference specific technologies like "linking", "object code", or "interface definition files" which don't apply to all programming languages, a lawyer's blood pressure rises.

          • notpushkin

            today at 7:39 AM

            > For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work.

            So I think it would cover pretty much any JS library usage, except maybe if you just drop in a widget and don’t interact with it in any way.

          • muragekibicho

            today at 6:22 AM

            Exactly. I was building a WASM lib using Emscripten and this was the exact question I could not answer

      • rincebrain

        yesterday at 7:33 PM

        (All personal opinion, etc.)

        I'm not actually sure what a better way to square the circle of not making the large entities that have developed a weird patronage relationship with open source projects run away while also avoiding the kinds of problem that the GPLv3 and AGPL are hoping to deal with, would be. Limiting the virality scope might be beneficial there, but I'm not sure how you would word that in a way that's not gameable.

        It feels like we've wound up in a weird position where because so many GPLv2 projects moved to GPLv3, companies were startled into paying attention to the risks involved in a new license with open questions about how it would shake out in actual courts, as well as being jolted to the very real possibility it could happen again, and took the path of risk reduction by moving toward platforms where that couldn't happen.

        You might compare it to everyone pointing to Solaris's source closing as a reason to not trust Oracle about MySQL's license remaining GPLv2. (As it turned out, so far, they haven't changed the license, but there was certainly a lot of fearmongering about that at the time.)

        So I think I agree that it's not so much a coordinated effort to steer anything as the direct effects of companies avoiding funding that space, as well as the knock-on effect that anyone whose goals involve large companies using their product and leveraging that avoids picking a license that precludes that in turn.

    • pferde

      yesterday at 6:58 PM

      The creation of those licenses, maybe. Their mass popularization, and the pooh-poohing of GPL licenses that often goes with it in related discussions, is much more recent.

• jakelazaroff

  yesterday at 3:19 PM

  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 contributors signed a CLA.

  • arp242

    yesterday at 4:26 PM

    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.

    • jinzo

      yesterday at 6:37 PM

      If we are real, it's also quite clear that contributions are not accepted at least from 2023. And the Readme talked about the project not meant to be self-hosted in the past.

      I have no horse in the race, just think that maybe this project is not a good measure of contributions.

    • jakelazaroff

      yesterday at 9:42 PM

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

      That's why I said "most people" (of which I think HN commenters are not a representative sample) rather than "nobody" :)

  • 8organicbits

    yesterday at 9:29 PM

    The trick is not to get attached to a project name. `Terraform` is a trademark of IBM (previously Hashicorp). Terraform used to refer to an open-source IaC project, but now it doesn't. OpenTofu, https://opentofu.org, is probably the most accurate name for the continuation of that open-source project.

    • account42

      today at 10:14 AM

      This is of course the correct way to proceed as an affected user but does not mean the bait and switch cannot be criticized.

  • _puk

    yesterday at 7:51 PM

    Sounds like we need a "forever open source" license.

    A commitment that any significant derivative retain the original (or some later version) of the original license.

    "Free to do whatever as long as it retains this license. A commitment that this license will not change, even by the original author".

    No special cases, just a blanket license for all derivatives.

    If it exists, what are the barriers to adoption? Why don't we all use it?

    • sakjur

      today at 6:13 AM

      I’d suggest the GPL family without a CLA as an approximation of that intent.

      > If it exists, what are the barriers to adoption? Why don't we all use it?

      My theory is that people in general don’t care that much, or (particularly in the case of corporations) consider permissive licenses to be ”freer” than copyleft.

    • Aurornis

      yesterday at 10:58 PM

      > A commitment that this license will not change, even by the original author

      Unless you’re entering into a contract with the project maintainer (which you’re not, if you’re just downloading or using it) then such a commitment means nothing.

      Applying an open source license to your work means you’ve licensed other people to use it under those terms.

      You can make all the commitments you want in the license, but it doesn’t actually commit you to keeping all future work open source as well under the law.

      So you could write this license and make the commitment, but if you changed your mind later and decided not to open source future commits to the project that you made then nobody could stop you. Not unless you had entered into a contractual agreement with them and exchanged some consideration (money).

    • yjftsjthsd-h

      yesterday at 7:59 PM

      I'm really not a lawyer, but I'm skeptical that such a thing is even possible; is it legally possible to say that you as the copyright owner will never relicense something?

      (What I'm given to understand does work is using a copyleft license and taking code from multiple parties without a CLA, because then relicensing requires all the copyright owners to agree, which for a large enough project is impractical.)

      • _puk

        yesterday at 8:02 PM

        How about a standard entity "OSI perhaps?!", that commits a file to an early stage of the repository (could this be automated), who then cannot / will not give approval for a relicense?

        • j1elo

          yesterday at 9:55 PM

          Relicensing still can be done, just keeping that file out. (and reimplementing it the same but with new code, if it was really needed for something important)

    • account42

      today at 10:20 AM

      Maybe this makes more sense as a change to trademark law than a license thing. If a name OpenSourceProject has gotten popular due to being open source then I would say it's in the interest of the public to ensure that OpenSourceProject keeps referring to an open source project an isn't misappropriated for something else. It's a kind of bait and switch fraud that I think should be generally illegal. On the other hand I don't see why we should care about the creator not being allowed to re-license his own work as long as no one has been mislead about what they are getting.

  • yesterday at 5:42 PM

• saghm

  today at 11:57 AM

  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.

  • SamInTheShell

    today at 12:15 PM

    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.

• bachmeier

  yesterday at 4:56 PM

  > 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.

  If you aren't interested in open source, that's your option, but open source has had a clear meaning for decades. You can use/write your software and people that believe in open source can use/write open source. What's the problem?

  • Aurornis

    yesterday at 11:00 PM

    > If you aren't interested in open source, that's your option, but open source has had a clear meaning for decades.

    If I’ve learned anything from reading HN comments, it’s that “open source” means different things to different people, including those who believe themselves to have specific knowledge of the history of the topic.

    There are half a dozen different claims about the original meaning of “open source” in this comment section alone. They’re coming from people citing history and notable figures from open source past.

    • wavemode

      today at 4:19 AM

      Yeah, and all but one of those claims is incorrect.

      "Open source" is not just a turn of phrase which became common over time. The phrase was coined by the founders of the Open Source Initiative, and it has always had a very specific meaning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative

      People who seem to think that "open source" has a variety of meanings, are probably confusing it for "free software" which does indeed have a variety of meanings (which was the whole reason the phrase "open source" was created - because "free software" was too vague, and they wanted to create a term with a single, specific definition!)

    • account42

      today at 10:23 AM

      Not at all. There are some people who want open source to mean something else than it does because they want the positive publicity that comes with the term without the commitments to user freedom. Those people should not be given any weight.

  • nothrabannosir

    yesterday at 5:06 PM

    Whether they contribute back their changes to their users.

    • adastra22

      yesterday at 5:23 PM

      Then you want free software (a subcategory of open source).

      • dragonwriter

        yesterday at 5:25 PM

        Free Software and Open Source have definitions that are both on their face and in practical application by the bodies responsible for each almost entirely identical. Neither is a subset of the other.

        If you are concerned about mandating users provide modifications by a similar license to the one they received material under, what you want is copyleft.

        • adastra22

          yesterday at 5:57 PM

          [flagged]

          • dragonwriter

            yesterday at 6:02 PM

            > “Free software” means copyleft.

            No, it doesn't. The FSF uses “Free Software” to refer to a broad class that is essentially identical to the OSI use of “Open Source.”

            The term the FSF uses for copyleft is “copyleft”, which is a subset of Free Software.

            • cxr

              yesterday at 6:45 PM

              To underscore the point here: the FSF

              1) hasn't/doesn't publish a free software definition that describes copyleft as a precondition to free software

              2) hasn't/doesn't claim in any of their non-normative commentary that the definition has that precondition

              3) readily and regularly refers to projects published under permissive licenses like the BSD, MIT/X11, and Apache licenses as "free software", despite not being copyleft licenses

              4) themselves publish/maintain/govern software projects that are licensed under permissive licenses like the aforementioned non-copyleft licenses

              The claim that "'free software' means 'copyleft'" is a pernicious, bizarrely recurring but wildly misinformed claim that only shows up on message boards by people who can't ever have actually read primary sources that explain the positions of the organization they purport to describe, and have instead just, like, decided they understand the topic (through, I dunno, osmosis or something, I guess).

              • adastra22

                yesterday at 7:09 PM

                https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

                Linked to from here:

                https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

                Very explicit about open source being different from free software.

                Also if what you say is true, there would be no reason for “open source” to exist. It was coined by Christine Peterson explicitly because the term free software conveyed a different ideal than the BSD/MIT license crowd was aiming for.

                • umanwizard

                  yesterday at 7:21 PM

                  > nearly all open source programs are in fact free.

                  You are just wrong, and your first link proves it. The definitions are essentially identical. The philosophies behind them are different.

                  It's like the "Gulf of America" vs. the "Gulf of Mexico". You are talking about the same territory in either case, just expressing a different viewpoint about it.

                • yesterday at 7:19 PM

          • pxc

            yesterday at 6:48 PM

            This is completely false and ahistorical. The first license associated with the term "open-source" was the MPL, which is a copyleft license.

            Open-source never attempted to distinguish itself from free software in terms of licensing or content, and "free software" has always included permissive licenses.

            You can find lots of free software licenses which are not copyleft listed on the FSF website, with links to longer commentaries on them. The FSF clearly identifies them as free software licenses, and always has.

            https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

            this page is linked to from FSF.org here:

            https://www.fsf.org/licensing/

            Take a few minutes reading the publications of the organizations and movements you're misrepresenting. Take a look at the OSI's Open-Source definition as well.

          • andrewshadura

            yesterday at 6:01 PM

            This statement is incorrect.

            • bigstrat2003

              today at 3:21 AM

              Indeed it is, but can people please not abuse the flag function for such cases? It's not against the rules to be mistaken, and "flag" is not supposed to be a super downvote.

              • andrewshadura

                today at 7:42 AM

                I never use the flag function.

          • jibal

            yesterday at 6:33 PM

            You are correct ... the other responses to you are not. "Free software" as in the FSF is "free as in freedom, not free as in free beer", which is why copyleft was invented, to establish such a distinction.

            • tsimionescu

              yesterday at 7:15 PM

              No, this is completely wrong. Free/libre software is distinguished from "gratis" software, such as demos or shareware. Any software that is freely available for users to legally modify and redistribute however they see fit, under the same license or some other, is free software.

              Examples of non-free software are shareware like WinRar, software only available for non-commercial use like OMNeT++ [0], and (slightly more controversially) things like ElasticSearch or MongoDB.

              [0] https://omnetpp.org/intro/license

              • jibal

                yesterday at 7:21 PM

                It's not completely wrong ... how rude. Shareware isn't even open source, generally, and it certainly isn't gratis--you have to pay for it, or at least should, and there are often restrictions or time limits if you don't. Again, the "free" in "free software" refers to freedom, not free beer.

                https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

                > “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.

                And

                > “Open source” is something different: it has a very different philosophy based on different values. Its practical definition is different too, but nearly all open source programs are in fact free. We explain the difference in Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software.

                etc.

                • tsimionescu

                  today at 6:32 AM

                  That definition, and Richard Stallman himself, completely agree with me. A BSD license also guarantees "that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software".

                  Here is Stallman spelling it out explicitly:

                  https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.en.html

                  > The two major categories of free software license are copyleft and non-copyleft. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL insist that modified versions of the program must be free software as well. Non-copyleft licenses do not insist on this. We recommend copyleft, because it protects freedom for all users, but non-copylefted software can still be free software, and useful to the free software community.

                  > There are many variants of simple non-copyleft free software licenses, such as the Expat license, FreeBSD license, X10 license, the X11 license, and the two BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licenses.

                  So, I stand by my assertion. You are completely wrong in saying that only copy left licenses are free/libre software, even according to Richard Stallman himself.

                  • pabs3

                    today at 8:25 AM

                    The BSD license does not offer the same software freedom guarantees as copyleft licenses though, since downstreams can elect to not release the source code. You are right otherwise though.

                • F3nd0

                  yesterday at 9:57 PM

                  > Shareware isn't even open source, generally, and it certainly isn't gratis--you have to pay for it, or at least should, and there are often restrictions or time limits if you don't. Again, the "free" in "free software" refers to freedom, not free beer.

                  Yes. The comment you are replying to already said this: ‘Free/libre software is distinguished from "gratis" software’.

                  Your earlier comment wasn’t wrong for saying that ‘free software’ refers to freedom; that part was correct. But it was wrong for agreeing with a comment which claimed that ‘free software’ means ‘copyleft’. Copyleft is free software, but free software isn’t always copyleft.

                  Saying that ‘free software means copyleft’ is like saying that ‘bird means goose’. Goose is a kind of bird, but not every bird is a goose; just like copyleft licences are free, but not every free licence is copyleft. The responses (which you called incorrect) were trying to explain this important difference.

                  • jakelazaroff

                    yesterday at 10:20 PM

                    Copyleft licenses don't even need to be free! All copyleft means is that derivative works must use the same license. For example, the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license [1] wouldn't fulfill freedom 0, since you can't use the material for commercial purposes.

                    (Granted, Creative Commons licenses are typically not used for software, but the point stands.)

                    [1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

                  • jibal

                    yesterday at 10:12 PM

                    > The comment you are replying to already said this: ‘Free/libre software is distinguished from "gratis" software’.

                    Which label they used for shareware, which is wrong. Like them, you misunderstand the issues.

                    > But it was wrong for agreeing with a comment which claimed that ‘free software’ means ‘copyleft’.

                    No, I'm not wrong about that. Read the link I gave, by RMS, who wrote the GNU Manifesto in 1985 that gave birth to the free software movement, which you mistake for 'gratis' software. He founded the Free Software Foundation. He came up with copyleft. Read it ... learn something.

                    > Copyleft is free software, but free software isn’t always copyleft.

                    You don't understand what "free" means in this context. Copyleft is liberated (free) software; it isn't necessarily gratis.

                    My comments have not been wrong at all--read the link I provided. I won't respond further, as it's all there, from the guy who originated the idea of "free (as in liberty) software" and founded the Free Software Foundation.

      • yesterday at 5:44 PM

    • MangoToupe

      yesterday at 6:38 PM

      That's copyleft, something OSI was basically created to not imply.

• jaredklewis

  yesterday at 4:36 PM

  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, then those users are probably going to choose one of the other options.

  As a result, licensing your project GPL or the like usually means relegating it to obscurity. There are very notable exceptions, including Linux and WordPress, but they are outliers. It's hard to monetize an MIT project, but it is even harder to monetize a project without users.

  Whether this is "good" or "bad" is a separate debate (err, usually flame war), but I think many people gloss over that this is a coordination problem and that everyone is acting rationally. For better or worse, software does not seem to be scarce.

  • eadmund

    today at 11:08 AM

    > 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, then those users are probably going to choose one of the other options.

    First, if someone isn’t paying, he’s not buying. ‘Paying’ should be understood broadly, e.g. code as well as money counts. A company paying dollars really doesn’t care that much about the license — plenty of companies pay for proprietarily-licensed products (even ridiculously limited ones, with dongles and high seat prices). OTOH, a company ‘paying’ with code contributions should prefer the GPL, because it knows that its contributions will never be taken away from it.

    Second, the GPL does not restrict users; it restricts developers from restricting users.

    The GPL family is the right way for individuals and companies to form a software commons in which all can benefit.

  • zelphirkalt

    yesterday at 7:39 PM

    I disagree. It will be harder to monetize MIT licensed projects, because any competitor can just grab and run. With AGPLv3, at least legally the competitor needs to publish their modifications as well. This in turn makes it more likely the competitor will not use your code, or if they do, in accordance with the license, which would be fine, and users of the product you build will mostly not care, because they don't even know what the licenses are about.

    • jaredklewis

      yesterday at 11:40 PM

      Sure, but you're skipping the first part where if you make your project AGPLv3 most users will just choose a different project doing the same thing but with an MIT license.

      I agree that if you can somehow achieve widespread adoption with a copy left license (like Linux or Wordpress), then that will be better for you. But IME copyleft licenses are a major hurdle to widespread adoption, so such projects remain obscure.

      I'm not saying it is a good thing, but I've never worked at a company where we were allowed to bring in copyleft dependencies (even though everything invariably runs on Linux, which is GPLv2).

      • zelphirkalt

        today at 1:28 AM

        If it stays obscure, that isn't necessarily too bad. You respect your users and grant them the freedoms, if they seek them, but if not then that's their choice. It is merely geared against competitors taking and running, making a "better" (moaaar features) closed source version.

    • roncesvalles

      yesterday at 11:32 PM

      None of the limitations of open-source licenses apply to the authors themselves. (author = the person or organization whose name appears in the copyright notice). I.e., you can have a MIT/GPL/AGPL licensed project, but have a "premium" fork/derivation/later-version of it that's completely closed source.

      I actually see this as a valuable incentive to open-sourcing under MIT -- if a commercial provider of your software emerges, it will help you test/prove that a commercial market for your software exists, after which point you can completely close-source it and pivot to purely commercial competition.

      Open-sourcing, then, is basically baiting the waters to see if anyone sees commercial potential in your work. And the minute that's validated, you get funding and start your company.

      • zelphirkalt

        today at 1:25 AM

        Close-sourcing a previously open source project is like a deathwish for that project. Will meet much aversion, and if the project is important, people will fork whatever the last open source version was. Then you usually lost all cards and don't have a business at all.

    • madeofpalk

      yesterday at 10:42 PM

      > It will be harder to monetize MIT licensed projects, because any competitor can just grab and run.

      Importantly - any competitor can grab it and modify it to make it easier for them to run at scale and keep those changes closed-source.

  • NoahZuniga

    yesterday at 4:39 PM

    Well, many developers publish their code not because they want to specifically make a successful open source project, but because they made something that was useful to themselves, and like the idea behind open source. In that case it makes more sense to do a copyleft license because it will legally require all derivatives to also follow that open source idea.

    • jaredklewis

      yesterday at 5:05 PM

      Yea I think stuff like this is great and will have some impact around the edges. Perhaps particularly in the realm of end-user software, like a window tiling manager.

      But once we start talking about the kind of software large corporations (like AWS) will have an interest in, projects have to be successful to be useful. Software requires maintenance so the maintainers need to be able to devote their time to maintaining and improving the project. So this will select for projects that are successful enough that the maintainers can focus on it fully (either because some company hires them to work on their own project, they can charge high consulting fees because of their association with the project, or whatever).

      I think "the code" (the thing covered by copyright) in most cases is not as valuable as "the project:" the leadership, the contributors, the users, the norms and practices, the commitment to ongoing maintenance, and so on. So just lots of individuals all putting pieces of their code out there with GPL probably doesn't make a lot of impact (though there is nothing wrong with it), because most users don't want "code" they want a "project" they can rely on.

      • account42

        today at 10:35 AM

        AWS doesn't seem to have an issue with using copyleft software.

        • eadmund

          today at 11:13 AM

          Which copyleft software does AWS use? Linux, certainly. And MariaDB/MySQL (but also the BSD-like PostgreSQL). I was under the impression that it typically avoids GPL software when there is a BSD- or MIT-licensed alternative.

      • swiftcoder

        yesterday at 6:23 PM

        > once we start talking about the kind of software large corporations (like AWS) will have an interest in

        I'm not sure why someone who is spending their limited free time building software to give away for free would want Amazon as a downstream consumer

        Do you enjoy spending your nights and weekends dealing with CVE reports, while a high-6-figure BigTech engineer nags you that they need it fixed?

        • jaredklewis

          yesterday at 6:38 PM

          We definitely agree on this point. Different licenses select for different things.

          It is an annoying problem to have, but if your goal is to be able to support yourself by working on your open source project full time (not saying this has to be or should be everyone’s goal), then having big tech engineers nagging you is probably a good problem to have.

          • swiftcoder

            yesterday at 6:58 PM

            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

            • Aurornis

              yesterday at 11:08 PM

              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.

              • swiftcoder

                today at 9:12 AM

                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)

              • zelphirkalt

                today at 1:12 AM

                Maybe it can happen, but ask the people maintaining open source projects long term, how much it helped them pass silly leetcode interviews, which companies insist must be done, even if you have a golden track record.

                • notpushkin

                  today at 7:52 AM

                  “Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.”

                  https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

        • Aurornis

          yesterday at 11:07 PM

          > I'm not sure why someone who is spending their limited free time building software to give away for free would want Amazon as a downstream consumer

          Are you kidding? This is the dream scenario for many open source projects: Getting adopted by a major company is a claim to fame like none other.

          > Do you enjoy spending your nights and weekends dealing with CVE reports, while a high-6-figure BigTech engineer nags you that they need it fixed?

          Then don’t? You don’t have to do anything. It’s fine to ignore it you want.

          Practically speaking, Amazon engineers aren’t going to sit around and hope the maintainer fixes the thing that unblocks them. If they actually need it, they’ll fix it. They might fork it. They might try to recruit the person.

          But nothing obligates you to do anything. This hand-wringing about the idea that someone might find the project useful enough to identify issues and report them is rather ridiculous. Just ignore it if that’s prerogative.

          • swiftcoder

            today at 6:50 AM

            Having been upstream of this problem (I was engineer at Amazon for ~5 years), they will typically not do any of those things.

            The amount of paperwork they have to jump through just to send you a patch makes it not worthwhile. They might fork in extremis, but to do that they first have to justify to management that it's worth ongoing effort to support. Hiring a maintainer really only happens for truly foundational projects like the Xen hypervisor.

            What they will do is use the public nature of the CVE process to pressure you to patch with the SLA - and that's generally pretty effective. Only a few open source groups (for example, the npm team) have enough public clout to reject CVEs without reputation damage.

    • bigstrat2003

      today at 3:27 AM

      > In that case it makes more sense to do a copyleft license because it will legally require all derivatives to also follow that open source idea.

      That is a matter of opinion. I have put out some open source stuff under the form you mentioned, and it's always BSD or another permissive license. I view it as quite wrong to force my moral choices upon others, so I give others the freedom to use whatever license they like. In my case, that is what makes sense because of my own moral convictions.

    • yesterday at 4:42 PM

  • landdate

    yesterday at 7:14 PM

    > licensing your project GPL or the like usually means relegating it to obscurity

    Subjective. Sure if you are talking about percent of market share, but it's a huge market, you don't need to capture even 1% of users to have a viable business.

    The vast majority of the GNU ecosystem is GPL. Bash, git, Apache, Gimp, Blender, Libreoffice.

    There are also a lot of projects that are dual licensed, allowing commercial software to be charged a fee and non-commercial software to use for free with GPL.

    • umanwizard

      yesterday at 7:24 PM

      Neither Apache nor LibreOffice is GPL. Apache is permissive whereas LibreOffice is MPL (a sort of middle way between permissive and copyleft).

• omnicognate

  yesterday at 3:13 PM

  > 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.

  • happymellon

    yesterday at 3:21 PM

    I think the problem that these folks have is that AGPL still allows other people to host the software.

    They want to seem altruistic but want to also be the only provider.

    GPL would have been a better initial license, and AGPL would have been the next logical step to ensure that changes that hosted services make can come back to the original version.

    I'm not entirely sure what they were hoping to get by making an extremely permissive licensed piece of software, but competition doesn't appear to be it.

    • heavyset_go

      today at 7:30 AM

      > They want to seem altruistic but want to also be the only provider.

      Some people pick the AGPL because the license itself acts like garlic to commons destroying IP vampires and are disappointed that those vampires still found a way to drink their IP milkshake.

      Has nothing to do with altruism and everything to do with not wanting to be taken advantage of for free labor and IP by powerful entities that would deny them a glass of water if they were dying from thirst.

      • account42

        today at 10:43 AM

        Except AWS is not an IP vampire in this case, they are providing a hosting service. There is no conflict between AWS's use and the spirit of the open source license.

        The conflict is entirely between the original developer wanting to be the sole service provider and the open source license that lets people host the software themselves. The software as a service business model is the problem here, not AWS hosting.

    • tptacek

      yesterday at 3:23 PM

      They care that other people can sell the software, not that other people can use the software, which is why the license they use makes that distinction.

      • cxr

        yesterday at 7:10 PM

        This is a confusing claim. Are you saying the chosen license (<https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/998e87263248...>) makes the software free to use to offer (e.g. gratis) "hosted or managed service[s]" so long as one does not sell the services? This is trivially confirmed not to be true. It prohibits all use of the software to provide services, not just a prohibition on selling them.

    • mynameisvlad

      yesterday at 3:31 PM

      > They want to seem altruistic but want to also be the only provider.

      This is an overly negative take. At the end of the day, they are still providing software and the source code free to use for practically every purpose except directly competing with them.

      That's still altruistic while also being sensible in the real world rather than an ideal.

      • passthejoe

        yesterday at 6:07 PM

        The license disallows use of the software for what it is intended: setting up a multi-user blogging system.

        • kelnos

          yesterday at 7:16 PM

          No, the license disallows use of the software for seeing up a multi-user blogging system as a paid service.

          You might say, "well wouldn't that be most of what people might want to do with it?" And you might be right, but so what? No one is entitled to build their business on the back of someone else's work, not without their permission anyway.

          That certainly makes software like this no longer Free Software. But I'm not religious about it, and maybe that's ok sometimes.

          (It also runs afoul of several parts of the OSI Open Source Definition, but maybe that's ok too.)

          • happymellon

            today at 6:30 AM

            > No, the license disallows use of the software for seeing up a multi-user blogging system as a paid service

            This is incorrect.

            https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/master/LICEN...

            > You may not provide the Software as a hosted or managed service that offers users access to substantial features or functionality.

            It does not make the distinction around a financial transaction.

          • jwitthuhn

            yesterday at 11:30 PM

            Not "as a paid service" just "as a service". The license does not allow me to stand up a Bear instance and let people blog on it for free.

      • foxglacier

        yesterday at 4:30 PM

        Not for practically every purpose. It's a blog platform to be used by services that provide blog hosting, just like his own business does, so any use of it would be directly competing with him. From TFA, he never wanted people to actually use it, just to look at the source code.

  • ahartmetz

    yesterday at 3:18 PM

    I thought so, too, at first. But there's a crucial difference: With the AGPL, Bear's competition can offer the software as as service if they publish the source code they are deploying. With the Bear license, Bear's competition just cannot offer the software as a service. It feels mostly in the spirit of FOSS to me, but Stallman would disagree. He has made it clear that there should be no restrictions on use.

    • cxr

      yesterday at 3:57 PM

      > It feels mostly in the spirit of FOSS to me

      From the license at <https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/998e87263248...>:

      "You may not provide the Software as a hosted or managed service that offers users access to substantial features or functionality"

      Given that the exclusive purpose of the Software in question is to implement a managed service for its users' hosting needs, I'm having trouble understanding how anyone could take the position that this is "mostly in the spirit of FOSS".

      The license might as well say, "You just can't use this."

      • rafram

        yesterday at 7:43 PM

        It’s saying that you can use Bear for your own blog, but you can’t launch a service that hosts other people’s blogs using it.

        • jwitthuhn

          today at 5:16 AM

          The readme has this to say about hosting your own blog on it:

          "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."

          "It isn't possible" is obviously not true but a plain reading of both that combined with the license would suggest you can't use bear at all for anything.

        • yesterday at 7:55 PM

    • happymellon

      yesterday at 3:22 PM

      > Bear's competition just cannot offer the software as a service. It feels mostly in the spirit of FOSS

      I don't see how, there is nothing in the spirit of FOSS by doing that.

    • jakelazaroff

      yesterday at 3:21 PM

      > With the AGPL, Bear's competition can offer the software as as service if they publish the source code they are deploying.

      Technically true, but in practice almost every tech company forbids GPL code. I bet if you re-read your employment contract closely you'll find that you agreed not to introduce any GPL code into the company's codebases.

      (Edited for clarity).

      • josephcsible

        yesterday at 3:39 PM

        This can't possibly be true, since the Linux kernel's code is GPL and approximately every tech company uses Linux.

        • jakelazaroff

          yesterday at 3:47 PM

          By "use GPL code" I mean integrate it into a company codebase (which would require the codebase to be licensed as GPL). Edited my original comment to clarify.

          • pabs3

            today at 7:23 AM

            Phones contain Linux, TVs contain Linux, cars contain Linux, clouds contain Linux. It is used everywhere.

            • heavyset_go

              today at 7:37 AM

              Companies that follow the law will release their changes to the Linux kernel when they distribute their products to users.

              Just using Linux is not enough to say anything built with it is a combined product in the eyes of the GPL, the license is pretty specific about what it considers a derivative work.

              For example, you can ship closed source apps and OS on top of Linux so long as you respect the license.

              • pabs3

                today at 8:52 AM

                > Companies that follow the law

                Those are pretty rare when it comes to the GPL, a lot of hardware companies do not comply with it fully, in some way. Vizio is being made an example of at the moment:

                https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

      • pmontra

        yesterday at 5:11 PM

        Note that this is about source code, not binaries, or nobody would be working with docker (and more.)

        Of course a company must forbid copy/paste of GPL code, because that would GPL the codebase and that's hardly what they want. But one should ask the Legal office (and/or other offices) about adding any MIT, BSD or proprietary library: credit must be given (how?), licenses must be available and compatible with the way the software is distributed. There are so many licenses out there, everything should be vetted.

        • jakelazaroff

          yesterday at 9:41 PM

          Re: code vs. binaries, it depends on the license. Another commenter has been pointing out that Google forbids any use of AGPL projects, period [1] because its definition of "linking" includes communication over a network.

          Of course everything should be vetted, but lawyers have canned advice about common licenses they see often — GPL, MIT, etc.

          [1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

      • ahartmetz

        yesterday at 3:40 PM

        I'm self-employed in Germany, and when I was employed, what was in the contract went more in the other direction: it was explicitly allowed to contribute to FOSS projects. Of course, it still would not have been OK to randomly add GPL software to a closed source customer project. If anyone had been stupid (uneducated, really) enough, somebody else on the same project would have noticed.

        • jakelazaroff

          yesterday at 3:48 PM

          Yeah, the second sentence is what I meant. This is why I'm writing comments on Hacker News rather than legal contracts :)

      • account42

        today at 10:49 AM

        Companies not wanting GPL code in code bases they want to keep proprietary should not be surprising to anyone. I fail to see how that is relevant to the comment you are replying though.

        Some companies subscribe to FUD (aka lawyers covering their ass) and forbid use of AGPL, GPL and sometimes even LGPL software outright even though they allow proprietary sofware that has even more restrictions, but the big elephant in the room that is usually cited for these open source to "proprietary but we still want the publicity of open source" license changes (AWS) is not one of those companies that put fear over profit.

      • jefftk

        yesterday at 10:50 PM

        I was at a FANG until 2022, and we were allowed to introduce GPL code into the monorepo. There were policies on how to do it correctly, but definitely not prohibited.

        (AGPL, however, was nearly impossible to get permission to use)

    • fsflover

      yesterday at 5:51 PM

      > With the AGPL, Bear's competition can offer the software as as service if they publish the source code they are deploying

      Any examples when AGPL was used successfully by competitors? Typically every company prohibits using this licence.

      • fsflover

        today at 11:08 AM

        Why am I silently downvoted?

  • echoangle

    yesterday at 3:16 PM

    AGPL doesn't really prevent Amazon from making it an AWS offering unless they want to modify the program and don't want to share the modifications.

    • omnicognate

      yesterday at 3:21 PM

      Why would I want to stop them making it available as a network service except as a way of circumventing the copyleft by effectively distributing it without actually distributing it (which AIUI the AGPL fixes)? If you want to place restrictions on how people are allowed to use the software then A) I don't see the relevance of AWS as a special case, and B) go ahead but don't imply the "open source crowd" are being unreasonable by not considering it open source.

      • account42

        today at 10:56 AM

        You'd want to stop them if like in TFA you don't actually want to provide open source software but rather want to sell your software as a service with free marketing from being "open source".

    • Arrowmaster

      yesterday at 5:31 PM

      It doesn't in an indirect way. A friend that worked for Amazon about 5 years ago told me they were even allowed to look at AGPL codebases on the clock because the lawyers were so afraid of it.

    • jdxcode

      yesterday at 3:20 PM

      Another reason is that copyleft licenses are kryptonite in large organizations.

  • cinericius

    yesterday at 3:18 PM

    Not a lawyer, but my understanding is there is a strong feeling that AGPL can be roughly ignored if a service provider provides some level of indirection (e.g. a proxy) between the user and the software. Then, the software is somehow not being accessed over a network and thus they are not required to release the source.

    • barnabee

      yesterday at 3:31 PM

      I have a strong feeling that speaking to a lawyer might reveal that to be untrue

      • gpm

        yesterday at 3:55 PM

        I have a strong feeling you would be told "we don't know, it's never been tested in court, there's a chance you would win and a chance you would lose on that argument".

        • swiftcoder

          yesterday at 6:26 PM

          Yeah, but lawyers say that about just about everything

    • shakna

      yesterday at 11:35 PM

      Not just a level of indirection. The "substantial features" of the code need to not be directly exposed.

      So if you had some AGPL OCR tool you were using, you could use it, but not in a way the user sees that text. Generate audio from it and expose the sound? Probably fine.

• jraph

  yesterday at 3:36 PM

  Free software ought to not be discriminatory and arbitrarily exclude users. Full stop. Anyone means anyone.

  Now, we can agree and talk about unfortunate consequences and possible mitigations.

  The AGPL is one possible mitigation: Big corps are usually afraid of it. But they do themselves: the AGPL doesn't forbid them to use the thing.

• pxc

  yesterday at 6:41 PM

  > As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't...

  Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the software for any purpose. You can't deny users this freedom "for their own good", or to spite big corporations, and still be free software.

  Subtler issues of power and dependency won't be resolved through licensing alone, and certainly not by compromising on basic software freedom for users.

• lmm

  today at 1:41 AM

  > 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.

  People are cold to source-available projects because of their experience of source-available projects. If you want to benefit from the warm reputation that open source has, you need to offer the things that open source offers. If you want to do some novel thing, that's fine, but your novel thing will have to earn its reputation.

• benrutter

  yesterday at 3:53 PM

  I guess I'm in that crowd, and well, I definitely recognise that! Open source is an important term, and I don't want to see it degraded. I think I'd find it annoying if this blog post was trying to claim Bear was still free software, or open source.

  That doesn't mean I think everything has to be open source. Bear is a blogging platform trying to make money and it seems fine to me for it not to be open source.

• orthoxerox

  yesterday at 6:30 PM

  > 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.

  This statement is 100% correct. Open means open for everyone. There's a "but they are providing FOSS as a service on a proprietary platform", which seems like the next step on the LGPL-GPL-AGPL stairway of licenses, but SSPL failed to convince anyone it was a necessary freedom:

  - MongoDB Inc obviously had no plans to release their own SaaS platform under SSPL

  - AWS source code being released wouldn't have benefited anyone other than maybe other major cloud providers

• account42

  today at 9:51 AM

  > 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.

• zitterbewegung

  yesterday at 5:35 PM

  Why use the MIT license when the AGPL is the better choice? I don’t understand why developers choose MIT and or Apache license and then figure out that they now have a competitor cloning their product .

  • vova_hn

    yesterday at 9:13 PM

    A lot of people are scared of GPL and other copyleft licenses, mostly because of how most big corporations treat GPL.

    Also, MIT license in particular is much shorter and easier to understand for a non-lawyer, than most other software licenses.

    • theamk

      yesterday at 10:56 PM

      I suspect that any corporation that prohibit GPL will prohibit BearLicence as well. Those usually have a list of approved licenses.

• didibus

  yesterday at 9:29 PM

  What's wrong with "source-available" ?

  Open-source normally means there's no use restrictions, but there could be some requirements in order to do so (like attribution).

  Free software normally means there's no use restrictions, but modifications can mandate maintaining the modifications also free to use, retaining the same freedoms.

  And if you fray from those, you can call it source-available and the specifics of what usage restrictions exist are per-license.

• supriyo-biswas

  yesterday at 3:19 PM

  The weird part is that these companies/individuals will use proprietary software with no qualms of the sort they express for these "source available" licenses.

  • DaSHacka

    yesterday at 3:56 PM

    Because the proprietary software never claimed to be anything but.

    • ahartmetz

      yesterday at 4:28 PM

      Well, Microsoft tried to muddy the waters with "Shared Source". Kind of like Office-Open- wait, Open-Office?-XML.

      • trelane

        yesterday at 5:02 PM

        They also had (for governments) the ability to look at the (supposed) source code.

        They couldn't do anything with it (alter or even build iirc), but they could look at it.

        https://www.computerworld.com/article/1336859/microsoft-open...

        Ha. How times have changed:

        > But governments won’t get the ability to alter source code. “This isn’t about developing or supporting customized versions of Windows,” Mundie said. The GSP and other source-code access programs are about “helping build comfort and trust with our key customers on how Windows is deployed, how security is running and how other software is running on top of Windows,” he said.

        > Russia’s Federal Agency for Governmental Communication and Information has signed a GSP agreement with Microsoft, and the company says it’s in discussions with about 20 other governments.

• gr4vityWall

  yesterday at 3:32 PM

  > 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.

  • ahartmetz

    yesterday at 4:27 PM

    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.

    • drdaeman

      yesterday at 5:49 PM

      Using the well-established terms according to their intended definitions is surely not maximalism or lack of nuance.

      (I have no objections against the “source available” though - it’s a pretty unambiguous and useful term, that isolates one specific property.)

  • mynameisvlad

    yesterday at 3:34 PM

    [flagged]

• singpolyma3

  yesterday at 5:02 PM

  If it's source available like this then it's clearly not a "community project"

  • sarlalian

    yesterday at 6:31 PM

    If you look at the commit graph, it’s definitely not a community project.

    • Melonai

      yesterday at 6:46 PM

      I think it's more like "a project made for the community", not quite "project made by the community", though the former is definitely usually what's implied.

• thayne

  yesterday at 4:22 PM

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

• BrenBarn

  yesterday at 7:41 PM

  Agreed. There was similar discussion around "the free and open web" on this thread some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066258

  I think some people lose sight of the difference between the theoretical possibility of competing forks/implementations/services and the practical possibility. If a big enough organization gets ahold of something and begins to drive it, the fact that it's nominally open source may not be enough to ensure that people have a practical ability to get out from under that organization. In other words you need not just openness of "information" but actual open space to maneuver in the real world of food and money and markets and so on.

  In many cases for-profit companies have taken up (or created) open source tools and made use of them in ways that still benefited the community at large. But it's not clear to me that FOSS licenses as we know them actually guarantee that. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to want to build safeguards against open source software being weaponized or co-opted for unfree purposes.

  One thing that's not clear from the Bearblog dev's post is whether he would be open to small-scale "competitors" who share an ethos similar to his own. In theory such competitors could be granted special license exceptions. If I were in his position I could see myself wanting to exclude big companies (and companies that hope to become big) while allowing small operators. The challenge is to create an enforceable license that encodes that, rather than requiring the author to manually approve or deny each request.

• 4ndrewl

  yesterday at 6:47 PM

  The existence of a "winner-takes-all dynamic" suggests a market failure, not a marketplace.

• jeswin

  today at 8:11 AM

  Unfortunately, AWS has invented and legitimized this entirely new class of leeching off of open source work, where they capture the entire economic value of a project by owning the hosting infrastructure; contributing nothing back and forking when the original authors protest. OSS stewards should correct this - in my view disallow cloud vendors beyond a certain size to freeload.

  • account42

    today at 11:06 AM

    I'd rather those "OSS vendors" would look for a better business model than software as a service.

    Having the option for competing service providers (including yourself) is a big advantage of open source.

• Illniyar

  yesterday at 9:07 PM

  That is exactly the stance. If there are strings attached that means some people can't use it, it's not really open. (GPL has strings attached if you use it, which is bad in a different way)

  I don't think anyone has a problem with the non open source licenses themselves. If you start with a closed source license or whatever, that's fine. It is switching from an open source licenses to something that is not.

  A lot of the projects that later switched out of open source would have never gotten any traction if they started with the license they ended up with.

• heavyset_go

  yesterday at 8:09 PM

  > 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.

  There are factions in open source advocacy, ranging from laissez faire views of freedom to views of freedom as something that needs some limitations to conserve it and prevent abuses/tragedy of the commons/etc.

• digdugdirk

  yesterday at 9:28 PM

  I've long thought there needs to be some sort of "cooperative source" license. With DAOs and whatnot, there's even the possibility of an automated global common fund for contributing and supporting. There's definitely a big opportunity to rethink things in this arena.

• tombert

  yesterday at 8:21 PM

  I'm not 100% convinced that these licenses actually work. How hard would it be for a BigCo to have an intern to modify the code enough so that it's not an easily detectable violation?

  I mean this stuff isn't just theoretical, there have been video games where we only find out they violated the GPL after a major code breach. [1]

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20129285

• Spivak

  yesterday at 3:22 PM

  Why the scare quotes, the first freedom of both Open Source and Free Software is the right to run the software for any purpose. It's not some little unimportant detail. It's arguably the most important property of Open Source.

  • cinericius

    yesterday at 3:33 PM

    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.

    • eadmund

      today at 11:15 AM

      > 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.

      That’s why the AGPL exists.

    • monocularvision

      yesterday at 6:44 PM

      The base-stealing that comes with the throwing out the term “winner-take-all” is astounding. People claim this all the time on HN without any shred of evidence that it is the case.

      The history of technology and markets show this just isn’t true on any significant timescale.

    • pabs3

      today at 7:25 AM

      Winner-take-all dynamics of the marketplace need to be regulated away with anti-trust law and funding for startups.

    • Spivak

      yesterday at 3:57 PM

      I mean in this specific case we're not talking about AWS or any other large company. We're talking about someone wanting to offer Bear.app hosting in the vein of managed Wordpress. This is good for Open Source. Having multiple commercial entities working off of and invested in the same codebase is exactly what Open Source envisions.

      It does take some mental discipline to actually believe in the movement and not view someone using your software to start a business as them "stealing your work." Such a thing doesn't make sense in OSS, you gave it away freely. It's a good thing, the competition is healthy. You don't have to believe, closed-source proprietary software is much easier to run a business off of as evidenced by most businesses operating that way. There's no shame in it. The FOSS folks are the free love "we don't believe in intellectual property mann" hippies of the software world.

• kelnos

  yesterday at 7:22 PM

  > if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source

  That's because then it isn't. Sorry, but you can't just take terms with an accepted meaning and decide they mean something else, without any conversation or consensus from there people using that term.

  The OSI has a specific definition of what "open source" means[0]. Restricting what users of the software can do in this way is in direct opposition to parts of that definition, so no, if you do that, then it is no longer open source.

  I'm not saying you aren't entitled to set up your licensing that way. I think it's disgusting when the likes of Amazon decide to take someone's hard work and use their massive oligopolist position to trivially outcompete anything the original author might try to do to make some money.

  But that doesn't mean it's open source. I think people need to stop being so afraid to call their software something else. They seem to be really attached to the idea of being an "open source developer", and don't want to drop that moniker even after changing their licensing away from open source.

  People also need to stop licensing their software under true OSS licenses, building a community of regular, significant contributors around it, and then changing their licensing (which they can do because they've [IMO shadily] required contributors to reassign copyright). That's a huge bait-and-switch, and people are right to be upset when that happens.

  In the case of Bearblog, it seems like the author is really the only significant contributor, so I think what he's doing is totally fine, for the record. Frankly I think he did this the right way: his announcement email is entirely reasonable and sympathetic, and he doesn't try to breathlessly claim that his software is still open source.

  [0] https://opensource.org/osd [1]

  [1] While I don't love how the OSI folks basically just decided they own the term "open source" and that they get to define it, I think they've been pretty good stewards over time, and having clear-cut definitions of things is a good thing.

• type0

  yesterday at 5:09 PM

  > we should find a term (better than 'source-available', which is cold and doesn't capture community projects accurately)

  it's not copyleft, it's a version of freeware license

• sneak

  today at 5:35 AM

  There’s no such thing as a “free ride” on software that is given away freely.

  It’s a gift. Once you gift it, it is no longer yours, it belongs to the people to whom you have given it to, to do whatever they wish with.

• yesterday at 3:14 PM

• senko

  today at 5:41 AM

  > 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

  Exactly! As RMS famously put it[0]:

  > It is essential, for the sake of true freedom, that every user - including the humble billionaire overlord who owns a rocket factory - has the unfettered right to run the software we, the noble proletariat of unpaid maintainers, lovingly craft in our basements at 3 a.m. Our highest ethical duty is to empower Jeff Bezos to instantiate yet another Kubernetes cluster that bills government agencies by the millisecond, for freedom means all users, especially those with yachts shaped like smaller yachts. Therefore, to deny Amazon the liberty to exploit our software without a cent of reciprocation would be to shackle the very essence of the Four Freedoms, for Freedom Zero is, and always has been, the sacred right of the richest man alive to squeeze the last drops of value from our volunteer patches while whispering “thank you for your contribution” into the abyss of a PR bot.

  On a more serious note:

  > 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.

  Now, if said software was intended to run on users machines to actually empower the user, we wouldn't be in this pickle, wouldn't we?

  I don't see Amazon freeloading off of GNOME, KDE, LibreOffice, Blender or GIMP.

  No, I would argue the root cause of the problems here is that bros want to own their users (saas to the moon) and think open source is the way to do it. I say, fork those people!

  As the author of Bear put in this very article:

  > 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.

  >

  > Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service.

  Nowhere here is the intent for users to host the blogs themselves. No, he wants uses to use his service, not his software.

  Fair enough, but that shouldn't have been open source in the first place. The author is just rectifying a mistake he made previously.

  If the author had actually wanted end users to use his software, he wouldn't care who runs it. Look at Hugo, they're doing alright.

  > enabling these companies to ensnare unsuspecting users

  Well, to me, as a user, Bear is the company that ensnares me unexpectedly, because it tells me it's running open source but the minute I want to run it myself, oh no, I'm freeloading.

  Whenever I see a project that requires a Kubernetes cluster to do something people would have in the past done in 15 files of C, I know they don't care about me as an empowered user in the "free software" sense. They see me as "a user" in a drug-addict sense.

  F that.

  [0] he never said that, obviously

• yesterday at 8:26 PM

• moralestapia

  yesterday at 6:04 PM

  >What Herman is doing is a service to us all

  I don't owe that guy s*it, what are you talking about.

  He's actually doing a disservice to the OSS community, as there's now another story of OSS turning non-OSS out of greed, which damages (by a bit, but still) the whole aura that true OSS has built over the past 40 years.

• 38

  today at 1:28 AM

  [dead]

• wahnfrieden

  yesterday at 3:25 PM

  edit: I thought this HN thread was about the Bear app never mind

  • jakelazaroff

    yesterday at 3:28 PM

    Bear has no VC investors: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/

    • today at 11:38 AM

    • thayne

      yesterday at 4:03 PM

      Are there any other maintainers? What happens when Herman Martinez is no longer able or willing to keep it going?

      • simianwords

        yesterday at 4:58 PM

        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 platform will live on.

        • account42

          today at 11:41 AM

          https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/graphs/contributo... paints a different story. Looks more like bus factor 1 + hopium.

    • wahnfrieden

      yesterday at 3:34 PM

      edit: I thought this HN thread was about the Bear app never mind

      • jakelazaroff

        yesterday at 3:41 PM

        If you read the link you just posted you can see that this person invested in a different product called Bear:

        > Its portfolio includes Bear, the Apple Design Award winner notes app, …

      • eviks

        yesterday at 3:43 PM

        No one is, just finish reading the sentence (or start - the op)

        > Bear, the Apple Design Award winner notes app

      • arp242

        yesterday at 3:45 PM

        Different Bear. https://bear.app/

        Which you could have known by spending five seconds on https://lambdalpha.com, or actually reading your own link which calls Bear an "Apple Design Award winner notes app", which doesn't really sound like the Bear blog.

        Stop spreading rampant misinformation.

        • leakycap

          yesterday at 6:45 PM

          Rampant? Isn't that a pretty extreme response to a mistaken link?

          • arp242

            today at 12:43 AM

            Well, it's edited now, but previously it contained strong accusations, and doubled down even stronger after someone else pointed out they're wrong.

• api

  yesterday at 3:42 PM

  Wait, you’re saying open source shouldn’t exist just to be free labor for billion dollar companies and hustlers? Or to dump free product on the market to make it impossible to compete with said billion dollar companies?

• brookst

  yesterday at 5:04 PM

  Perhaps a better term would be “limited use open source”

  • cgijoe

    yesterday at 10:17 PM

    The source is ajar.

  • yencabulator

    yesterday at 6:12 PM

    That's not open source then.

  • yesterday at 5:41 PM

  • rzzzt

    yesterday at 5:24 PM

    closen source?

    • WesolyKubeczek

      yesterday at 6:58 PM

      Peeping source

      • Nevermark

        today at 4:48 AM

        Let's not bring Meta's imaginary source license to violate privacy and Mark Zuckerberg into this.

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 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.

• ezekg

  today at 12:36 PM

  I missed the "discover" before. What a great idea. I've been reading through various blogs this morning, feeling like the internet is small again.

> Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service. And it hurts. 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. It hurts to have poured so much love into a piece of software to see it turned against you and threaten your livelihood. It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it.

The free solution to this is Affero GPL. The AGPL ensures that anyone who hosts a program must grant its users the same rights to use, examine, modify and share it that he received. The original author can just download that source and incorporate its changes.

That means that a fork doesn’t hide changes from the original author who ‘poured so much love’ into it.

We as a community have got to stop using the MIT or BSD licenses on our code. Use the AGPL for server code, the GPL for tools and the LGPL for libraries.

• NullCascade

  today at 11:15 AM

  >Use the AGPL for server code, the GPL for tools and the LGPL for libraries.

  If we are doing it for ideological reasons why not go all in and use AGPLv3 for everything, including libraries? It also has the added benefit that big corporations will not use your code.

• delfinom

  today at 11:04 AM

  Eh? Big players still run AGPL licensed services. The concern is not about the access to source code.

  The concern is livelihood. When a big player swoops in, they can completely decimate your business because of shear scale advantages, they can undercut you into bankruptcy. And while sharing the source under even GPL is noble, it's just also kneecapping your ability to make and grow a new business if it's a tool/service that has market traction. The OG author having access to that modified source code does absolutely nothing to help them.

  The big players are literally seagulls waiting to steal your current and future customers.

Has 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

[3]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/

• ArnavAgrawal03

  yesterday at 8:58 PM

  We use a BSL for our product (https://morphik.ai) and usually stay away from calling it anything. We'd just say "repo is public at: https://github.com/morphik-org/morphik-core". I like the term fair source, though.

  Is it correct to assume that software than eventually becomes open under something like Apache or MIT is fair source? Or is there more subtlety to it?

  • the_mitsuhiko

    yesterday at 9:01 PM

    > Is it correct to assume that software than eventually becomes open under something like Apache or MIT is fair source? Or is there more subtlety to it?

    The concrete definition we came up with and published:

    > Fair Source is an alternative to closed source, allowing you to safely share access to your core products. Fair Source Software (FSS):

    > - is publicly available to read;

    > - allows use, modification, and redistribution with minimal restrictions to protect the producer’s business model; and

    > - undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP).

  • yesterday at 9:02 PM

Naive. Guy picks a license that allow anyone to do anything they want with his code. Later realizes that was not appropriate when he's trying make money. Changes to an obscure license that on the surface seems to fix the problem.

Your options are: MIT / BSD, GPL, LGPL, AGPL. All others are unnecessary and create needless incompatibility.

• mottosso

  yesterday at 5:30 PM

  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").

  • sarlalian

    yesterday at 6:52 PM

    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 how this works”… that ends up leading to … oh crap a bunch of people who have never contributed, and will never contribute, are hosting versions of what I created and taking money that I really would like to have to feed my family.

    • account42

      today at 11:52 AM

      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.

• PhilippGille

  yesterday at 11:35 PM

  I think the MPL is a useful license as well, and underrated/underused.

  It's less viral than the GPLs when just using the licensed work, and less permissive than MIT / BSD because changes have to be open sourced, when the program using the changed library is distributed.

  • phkahler

    today at 2:48 AM

    And IIRC you can convert from MPL to GPL?

• themerone

  yesterday at 5:38 PM

  MIT & BSD don't include a patent grant, that's a good reason to go with the Apache license.

  • phkahler

    today at 2:53 AM

    The Apache license is IMO ok in isolation. But its good to minimize the number of licenses used to enable sharing of code between programs. I also have a serious dislike of the Apache Foundation for their continued "support" of the joke that is OpenOffice and its trademark. That is such a disservice to open source and Free Software that I boycott them.

• madeofpalk

  yesterday at 10:45 PM

  I don't think Guy really cares. They made their project, and they want the source to be available, and so chose a license that allows for that.

• palata

  today at 8:54 AM

  Don't forget MPLv2 and EUPL.

• bruce511

  yesterday at 6:54 PM

  Naive. Users who think a project that is Open Source will remain Open Source forever.

  Authors gave the right to change license to a proprietary one. Users being surprised by this are as equally naive as developers who think you can make money writing Open Source.

  • Vinnl

    yesterday at 7:26 PM

    Well, the versions that were published as open source will remain open source forever. That's never a guarantee for new updates by the same author, for any licence.

• zvr

  today at 10:26 AM

  Open Source is not a business model.

I 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.

• ezekg

  yesterday at 3:19 PM

  Shame on the people who recommend the AGPL to effectively be an OSI-approved source-available license.

  This is a grievance against the spirit of open source.

  • happymellon

    yesterday at 3:31 PM

    AGPL is exactly the spirit of open source. The license used by bear violates freedom 0. AGPL ensures that freedom 1, 2 and 3 are allowed even in hosted services scenarios.

    Freedom 0 the freedom to use the work

    Freedom 1 the freedom to study the work

    Freedom 2 the freedom to copy and share the work with others

    Freedom 3 the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative works

    • levkk

      yesterday at 7:09 PM

      Gotta love these are zero-indexed. Written by an engineer for engineers.

      • Skunkleton

        yesterday at 8:15 PM

        Its weirdly incorrect to zero index stuff like this. The zero index refers to the start of the first thing, which is not what numbered lists are supposed to indicate.

        • F3nd0

          yesterday at 10:33 PM

          If I recall correctly, there were originally three freedoms, but then a fourth one was thought of and put at the front to give it prominence, numbering it as zero as not to disturb the original numbering.

    • F3nd0

      yesterday at 10:30 PM

      That is not the spirit of open source, but rather the spirit of free software. The spirit of open source is to effectively have freedom without talking about it.

  • nothrabannosir

    yesterday at 5:29 PM

    the corporations who disallow agpl only do so because they want to comply in a way that is against the spirit of open source. When I advocate for the agpl to prevent Amazon and Google using my software, it’s not because of who those companies are, but how they use it.

    If Amazon tomorrow turns around and open sources everything that is a derivative work of the code they ever used, I would be more than happy, even proud if they used my software. Today any company which doesn’t deny their users the core software freedoms is already free to do so.

    This is not a “hack” to be maliciously compliant OSS; this is the spirit of open source.

    Why do you think the GPL has the virality clause in the first place?

    Edit: a perhaps reductive, but hopefully instructive summary: MIT/BSD guarantee freedoms of the software developers, GPL guarantees freedoms of the software users.

    You are free to choose which you prefer, but they're quite explicit choices, and the AGPL is absolutely squarely in the spirit of the GPL.

    (Now if you had said you take issue with the tivoization clause, on the other hand... :) :))

    • kiitos

      yesterday at 9:07 PM

      > the corporations who disallow agpl only do so because they want to comply in a way that is against the spirit of open source

      believe it or not this is not actually true! the corporations who disallow agpl do so because their lawyers (correctly) tell them that agpl-licensed software has not been adequately tested in relevant courts of law, and that by including agpl-licensed software they are opening themselves up to unknown/unbounded legal liability/risk!

      "the spirit of open source" has nothing to do with anything!

      the more you know

      • nothrabannosir

        yesterday at 10:21 PM

        I’ve heard this one before and if the agpl were two years old I’d buy it. But they had ample opportunity to craft a better license by now, so at this point it’s hard to believe that’s not just a convenient excuse.

        Don’t like the agpl wording, but agree with the spirit? Ok, you have the lawyers, write a better agpl that abides by the same spirit and which you trust.

        But: nothing. And waiting won’t change that. It may be also true, but it’s just excuse at this point. They’re not chomping at the bit to introduce networked virality of software freedom into their platforms.

  • tptacek

    yesterday at 3:22 PM

    It's one of four licenses linked on the front page of the FSF.

    • ezekg

      yesterday at 3:23 PM

      And it's the most abused license in the history of open source [0] [1].

      [0]: https://keygen.sh/blog/weaponized-open-source/

      [1]: https://keygen.sh/blog/whither-open-source/

      • jraph

        yesterday at 3:32 PM

        Skimming your links, it seems you target the AGPL, but you take issue with CLAs.

        You should be vocal against CLAs, not the AGPL. CLAs with any license is a risk of seeing the code closed up.

        • ezekg

          yesterday at 3:36 PM

          The thing is that the AGPL is abused even without a CLA -- as is evident from this very thread. Just look at all the comments saying the AGPL prevents competition! It has so much FUD around it that it's effectively, to most, an OSI-approved source-available license with or without a CLA. In COSS, it's almost never chosen for altruistic reasons, it's chosen to to be a non-compete.

          • jraph

            yesterday at 3:41 PM

            People saying wrong things about the AGPL isn't an AGPL problem, it's an issue of people saying wrong things.

            AGPL allows competition. Any free software license does. It's rule 0 of free software.

            > it's chosen to to be a non-compete.

            Well, too bad for them, because I can still fork this AGPL software and compete. So what's the issue?

            The issue would be for contributors contributing for to this code under CLA seeing their contributions closed up. If that's not your thing, don't contribute to software under such CLA. I avoid it myself.

            • ezekg

              yesterday at 3:43 PM

              > Well, too bad for them, because I can still fork this AGPL software and compete. So what's the issue?

              No legal department will ever allow it due to the FUD. That's the whole fucking point.

              • lexicality

                yesterday at 10:25 PM

                The AGPL is supposed to increase user freedom, not the legal department's freedom.

                The FSF have never cared even slightly about corporations being happy. Who cares if Google can't enrich themselves further? The point is to protect the users who are free to fork / host the software themselves.

              • jraph

                yesterday at 3:44 PM

                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 FUD, because they don't like the AGPL.

                Meanwhile, my goal of providing software freedom to my users is fulfilled.

                • ezekg

                  yesterday at 3:53 PM

                  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 if they did, we'd likely even see a move towards non-OSS licenses, ones that are clear as to their intent and rules -- rather than relying on ambiguity -- because there would no longer be an OSI-approved license that businesses could use to have their cake and eat it too.

                  Very few COSS business/startup/w/e right now are choosing AGPL for altruistic reasons. This thread and every other COSS licensing thread here are evidence of that.

                  Few of them care about software freedoms, or know why they chose the AGPL. They have a playbook that says AGPL lets them take advantage of the open source distribution flywheel, while largely protecting them from the risks associated with commercial open source, i.e. competition. They choose AGPL for this, not because it's the best license for users.

                  I honestly don't get how people don't see the deception under the AGPL right now.

                  • jraph

                    yesterday at 4:07 PM

                    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.

                    • ezekg

                      yesterday at 4:24 PM

                      > 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.

                      • NoGravitas

                        today at 11:52 AM

                        > 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.

                      • jraph

                        yesterday at 7:49 PM

                        > It's lying.

                        I don't see how it can do this. The AGPL is a license text. It states what people can do with the licensed code. What is lying in this text?

                        > I guess I care about clear rules, clear intentions, and I care about integrity

                        Me too

                        > The AGPL is ambiguity; unclear rules, veiled intentions

                        That's where I don't agree: The rules are written in the license text and I see no ambiguity there. Where is the ambiguity in the AGPL text? What is not clear about it? What granted rights are we not sure about?

                        > veiled intentions

                        The original intent of the AGPL authors (the FSF) was clear and simple to me: ensure the end user's freedom. It was GPL, but address the SaaS situation where someone can modify networked GPL software, make users use it from the network, without having to redistribute the modification since the program runs remotely and not on the user's machine. And that intent is perfectly align with what I want for my code.

                        Sure, people with bad intents will use the AGPL, and so what?

                        People kill with knives, but I'll definitely keep cooking with mine. The AGPL is a tool. It doesn't, by itself, has intents, especially veiled intents.

                        I'm not going to stop using the AGPL because someone wants to use it to trap users.

                        This is all abstract, I'd appreciate concrete examples where:

                        - people have done that, without a CLA (because yeah, I'm convinced AGPL+CLA can be bad).

                        - the AGPL doesn't work well for someone using it with the original intent in which the AGPL was written.

                        • ezekg

                          yesterday at 8:06 PM

                          Here's a thread from a couple hours ago on X: https://x.com/_m27e/status/1962563736142565882. Read the images and follow the quoted posts.

                          The example comes straight from the mouth of a COSS founder.

                          • jraph

                            yesterday at 9:22 PM

                            Sorry, but this yes-answered AI slop subtly makes no sense, it just reads comfortable to you. You should not delegate writing your opinion to the llm and even less use it to shape your opinion, this is my main takeaway from your screenshot. The AI answered your biased question in a way that pleases you, it's well known that they do this. This stuff is actually scary, and that clever people like you rely on this and don't notice the glaring issues is even more.

                            The agpl is ambiguous because users may choose not to fully use the freedom they were given? Sorry but this is bullshit. I'm glad I haven't started using this stuff yet (for other reasons). I'm sure I wouldn't notice such issues in topics I'm not at ease with and I can see how easy one can be seduced by this stuff.

                            Now, I'm convinced AGPL can be misused. What's more, I'm certainly quite happy that a side effect of the AGPL is that Google won't touch it, to mirror the comment you point to (whose author is wrong by the way, the intent behind the AGPL was not to exclude big tech, but to promote/protect user software freedom). All the fud around the AGPL actually comes from companies like Google, so respectfully fuck them all. Nobody could possibly have weaponised the AGPL against them had they not started spreading all the fud in the first place.

                            But even considering that picking the AGPL to scare big tech away is bad and weaponizes it (which I can hear, and let's assume), I believe you are wrong that nobody chooses the AGPL for the user freedom genuinely. There are a lot of examples of software under AGPL in good faith seemingly to me. Examples: Nextcloud, Joplin, CryptPad, Overleaf, Passbolt, Univention...

                            I doubt any of these commercial projects from friendly (?) companies choose the AGPL to fuck the world. I don't know the numbers, maybe it's a minority. You may not have numbers as well. Are you against the AGPL when used in good faith? If so, what to you suggest as an alternative?

                            I'm with you with the wish people were altruistic. But the system we live in doesn't exactly help being altruistic. Not being altruistic is certainly not a trait of people using AGPL, it's virtually everyone in a commercial setting (although some of us try to do their best to be good humans and virtuous). If anything, the AGPL was born from a ideal and that was certainly driven by something like altruism. All this blame towards the AGPL because people are out there to make money really feels weird to me.

                            Anyway, I don't think we'll reach an agreement here and that's OK. Thanks for the discussion, despite the strong disagreement it is/was stimulating.

                  • nothrabannosir

                    yesterday at 5:48 PM

                    But why wouldn’t they change their minds if those big corporations actually changed their ways? Is there a similar sentiment against red hat?

                    I now understand where you’re coming from but I am not sold on your prediction that the agpl would crater if Google started complying with it. It would mean that Google open sources everything which is derivative work. That sounds like it would buy a lot of good will amongst precisely those people who are mad about how Amazon screwed redis (to put it bluntly).

          • throwaway38477

            yesterday at 9:04 PM

            > In COSS, it's almost never chosen for altruistic reasons, it's chosen to to be a non-compete

            Seems like the "COSS" grifters are the problem, not the AGPL or the average person who chooses AGPL.

      • account42

        today at 12:14 PM

        Gee I wonder why a proprietary software licensing company would want to disparage the AGPL.

        • ezekg

          today at 12:43 PM

          I've probably contributed more to open source than you [0]. I also contribute the source code of my entire company under the open source Apache 2 license via DOSP [1].

          I wouldn't be so quick to judge. I love open source. But I also think words and intent matters.

          I don't really 'win' by attacking potential customers/users.

          [0]: https://keygen.sh/open-source/

          [1]: https://keygen.sh/license/

      • jakelazaroff

        yesterday at 3:39 PM

        What specifically is your problem with the AGPL? I read both of your links and while there are a lot of incisive statements ("But the truth is, the AGPL isn't used to increase user freedom — it's used to restrict it, primarily through its legal ambiguities") you never spell out why you believe them.

        • torstenvl

          today at 4:02 AM

          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 definition.

          • jakelazaroff

            today at 12:44 PM

            Let's grant your definition of "redistribution" for the sake of argument. How does the license restrict your use of any modified versions of the software? Like, what specifically are you forbidden from doing?

          • pabs3

            today at 9:01 AM

            The extra network clause triggers on modification, not redistribution.

            • torstenvl

              today at 12:06 PM

              You're literally not even capable of having a cogent conversation about this. Next time, read the comment you're responding to.

      • happymellon

        yesterday at 3:41 PM

        > Author's note: the above thoughts are for how the AGPL is used in startup-land alongside a CLA — not for AGPL in general. The AGPL is a fine open source license for libraries and other infrastructure.

        The whole piece is about CLAs, the AGPL has absolutely nothing to do with signing over your copyrights. See Canonical for the same behaviour without the AGPL, the AGPL just requires that you allow your users to also see the code they are using, even if it is accessed over a network.

        > Many, like Google, have flat out banned the AGPL.

        Yeah, but that's because Google hates sharing what they have built on the shoulders of giants.

        • yesterday at 3:52 PM

        • ezekg

          yesterday at 3:47 PM

          The first piece is about CLAs, yes, but the second is about the AGPL abuses in COSS et al.

      • tptacek

        yesterday at 3:23 PM

        You might take that up with the FSF, which clearly disagrees with you about its "affront".

        • arccy

          yesterday at 3:51 PM

          [flagged]

          • drdaeman

            yesterday at 6:13 PM

            No offense meant, but what's wrong with y'all today, people? Why so many folks in the comments use words in a way that doesn't match their dictionary-intended meanings and even insist that doing otherwise is something... weird, in a bad way? Am I taking crazy pills?

            Save for The Church of Emacs and St. IGNUcius (obvious jokes), FSF is a political and social activism organization - not a religious one. They have foundational principles and manifestos, sure, but those aren't religious dogmas, but rather the views/desires how the society should work.

            Labeling FSF as religious implies that it's a cult and thus there's no talking reason to them. But they're no more religious than any other civil rights movement - the beliefs about software freedoms are no different than beliefs in any other social rights.

      • JoshTriplett

        yesterday at 8:00 PM

        Using a FOSS license and charging money for an alternative license is not abuse. And those blog posts appear to be FUD spread by a company whose own software is under proprietary licenses with source available.

        People are welcome to use and host AGPLed software under its own FOSS terms. If people don't want to do that, and want to pay for alternative terms, that is also a sign that the license is effective. There's no point in restricting things people don't want to do. The GPL restricts something people want to do: make proprietary software. The AGPL restricts something people want to do: host software without distributing the source at all.

"I released source code under the MIT license and people are now using it to their financial benefit. Who could have possibly seen this coming?"

Why does this keep happening? Why are so may developers blind to this obvious outcome?

• dewey

  yesterday at 6:28 PM

  MIT was always the easy default that every project used, you just select it from the GitHub dropdown and you are done when setting up a new project. I think you can't really blame people for using it.

  Especially when your project is new it's also not often clear that this project will become something more serious later where you have to worry about such things as people cloning your project.

  • 360MustangScope

    yesterday at 11:35 PM

    How would GPL change the outcome?

    A lot of people say that it can prevent these situations but from working for large enterprises, a lot of the offerings that are created literally don’t even change the code. Thus they have nothing to contribute and have no obligation to release any source code.

    GPL also does not prevent the corporation from building software in front of whatever GPL service it is. Kind of like the Linux kernel, why bother changing the kernel when you can build software in front of it and not change anything and thus have nothing to release.

    • redman25

      today at 8:13 AM

      Did you reply to the wrong comment? The posters above never mention GPL.

• jotaen

  yesterday at 9:15 PM

  Why would this be surprising? The MIT license explicitly allows to relicense a project at any point. In this case, the Bear maintainer decided to start off with a permissive license and now exercised their rights to change to a more restrictive license due to changing requirements. To me, this seems actually quite reasonable.

  • 4ad

    today at 10:46 AM

    The copyright holder (the author) is solely responsible for choosing how they want their work to be distributed, and is not bound by any other sort of constraint. They can choose any license at any time, and change their mind however often, and it whatever direction they want. Any previous licenses used (MIT here) bear no effect whatsoever. There is no license in the world (and cannot be) that would prohibit the copyright owner from changing it. It makes no sense, the license terms only apply to the licensee, not to the licensor.

    Of course, the author cannot retroactively change the license of any previously distributed work. Anyone is free to fork off Bear from its last MIT code and do whatever they want with it.

    So no, the MIT license does not "explicitly allow to relicense a project at any point" (emphasis mine). The MIT license allows licensees to license their derived work however they see fit, it has no effect on the relicensing by the licensor (the copyright holder).

• darkwater

  yesterday at 6:04 PM

  Because between 15 and 20 years ago the BSD zealots won that culture war. I would really love to see a simulation where GNU licenses won that culture war and which landscape we would have today.

  • sunshowers

    yesterday at 6:30 PM

    There are good reasons the so-called "BSD zealots" won the so-called "culture war", such as the definition of a derived work being largely uncharted territory. Did you know that there's a compelling legal argument that the GPL attaches to programs talking to each other via JSON data structures?

    I think MPL 2.0 is the ideal kind of copyleft, because of its scope being very clear.

    • lmm

      today at 1:56 AM

      > Did you know that there's a compelling legal argument that the GPL attaches to programs talking to each other via JSON data structures?

      The GPL attaches to programs that are legally derivative works. So does any other license that doesn't explicitly grant the right to prepare and distribute derivative works, such as the overwhelming majority of commercial/proprietary licenses. The issue is with the overall copyright/legal system, not with the GPL specifically, and given that most entities are comfortable using at least some non-BSD programs it doesn't seem to worry people in practice.

      • sunshowers

        today at 1:58 AM

        Right, as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45096736, simply running GPL programs is probably fine. Input/output that doesn't establish "intimate communication" probably doesn't create a combined work, but "shipping complex data structures back and forth" does, according to the FSF.

        There isn't a similar degree of legal risk with MPL 2.0, nor with non-copyleft licenses (which is the subject of this subthread, not proprietary licenses) -- whether or not a plugin counts as a combined work, there are no requirements on you.

        • lmm

          today at 2:22 AM

          > There isn't a similar degree of legal risk with MPL 2.0, nor with non-copyleft licenses (which is the subject of this subthread, not proprietary licenses)

          There is a similar degree of legal risk with the overwhelming majority of licenses in use. Yes, using exclusively permissively-licensed software would let you avoid this particular risk - but given that essentially no-one (BSD advocates are, if anything, less scrupulous about avoiding proprietary software than GPL advocates - you rarely hear of BSD-land pushing firmware into a separate nonfree repository or the like) does that, it's clearly not a risk many people care much about.

    • kstrauser

      yesterday at 9:18 PM

      There is no such compelling legal argument. That’s an extraordinary idea with zero precedent or support.

      • sunshowers

        yesterday at 9:22 PM

        https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins

        > When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program?

        > It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins. If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.

        JSON data sent over the wire, particularly data with nested arrays and maps, and especially a bidirectional communication protocol, can reasonably count as "intimate communication" with "complex data structures" shipped "back and forth".

        This is nonbinding guidance, but it is from the FSF, and it is legally untested afaik (not a lawyer). There's sufficient legal risk here that I'd be wary of using rich communication protocols with GPL programs, particularly if there isn't an explicit exception for that protocol.

        • kstrauser

          yesterday at 9:50 PM

          "Intimate communication" here almost certainly refers to shared memory. No one is claiming passing JSON over the wire is the same as linking, or else a GPL webserver could insist that browsers be licensed under the GPL.

          • sunshowers

            yesterday at 9:55 PM

            > "Intimate communication" here almost certainly refers to shared memory.

            No, shared memory is addressed later within the same answer.

            > Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking.

            The first part of the answer clearly includes programs sending each other "complex data structures", including nested JSON data, over pipes.

  • orthoxerox

    yesterday at 6:19 PM

    GPL wouldn't have changed anything. Or even AGPL, if you had been running an unmodified Bear instance.

My bedraggled plea: capitalize proper nouns. Proper nouns are specific, unique entities. Proprietary definitions of phrases like Open Source or Free Software are proper nouns.

"My visa has expired" means something different than "my Visa has expired". "Which way is the Subway" is a different question than "which way is the subway". This is a basic convention in written English.

I've used the phrase 'open source' to mean what now is commonly labelled source-available for 30 years. I'll never stop. Open, as in a book cover or a window. Source, as in the unicode or whatever that gets eaten by a compiler and turned into computer programs. Normal words with normal usage.

The OSI or FSF have no authority over your usage of these words, and you should not presume that it has authority over other people's usage of the words. Capitalizing Open Source signals to readers that a SPECIFIC_THING is being referenced.

As is, it's always a coin flip to determine whether usage of 'open source' is the colloquial or proprietary version. Makes me insane.

• 0xfffafaCrash

  today at 5:06 AM

  Have you considered that some people listen to text rather than read it? Do you think screen readers, non-native English speakers, or anyone else listening to these are able to reasonably differentiate between “Open Source” and “open source”?

  Most readers won’t notice the difference or disregard it as meaningless and if you have to explain to everyone your position on a matter of communication it’s likely that you are the one who needs improvement with respect to your communication, not the rest of the world.

  • philipwhiuk

    today at 10:52 AM

    > screen readers

    Good screen readers will definitely pronounce capital letters differently by way of emphasis.

  • popalchemist

    today at 7:01 AM

    Impractical as he is, he is still technically correct, and I suspect, courts would back this stance were it ever to be tried in court.

I'm sad to see this. I supported Bear because it was open source. As that's no longer the case, I just canceled my membership.

I would love to see this reversed and moved to AGPL instead.

• bruce511

  yesterday at 6:50 PM

  I think this is fair, by both Bear and yourself. He's free to attach any license he likes, you are free to use it or not.

  Obviously the goal of Open Source licenses does not include making money. You might, or might not, but it's not a priority.

  Equally your goal may be to only support Open Source projects. That's fine. For you removing support for this project makes sense.

  Once a project reaches the stage of needing to create an income stream, Open Source licenses are no longer appropriate.

  Yes, some developers are naive in thinking Open Source licenses protect their income stream. Yes some users are naive in thinking that projects will remain Open Source forever.

  Source-available, or Shipped-with-source of whatever you want to call it is a proprietary license which is just fine. It's not Open Source, nor does it need to be.

  • account42

    today at 12:35 PM

    Legally it's OK but I think ethically using open source to build up a brand that is then used to sell proprietary software is ethically questionable - just like the free until the competition has been eliminated bait and switch common in tech startups. Not saying this happened in this specific case though.

• fastball

  today at 5:10 AM

  What is the difference (to you) between open source and source available?

  • hellcow

    today at 11:09 AM

    One is altruistic, akin to charity. It deliberately maximizes users’ rights to do anything they want with the software (freedom 0). I’m only in the lucky position I’m in now because of open source, and I want to push for more of that in the world with my wallet and my time.

    I’m not going out of my way to support a commercial license. There are a million commercial blog platforms to choose from.

>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...

• maronato

  yesterday at 9:06 PM

  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

  • alberth

    yesterday at 9:38 PM

    The license doesn’t mention anything about “personal” or “internal” use.

    Again, IANAL, but I can see why a company might be cautious about using Bear as a self-hosted blog engine, since companies technically have “users.”

    For comparison, the Elastic License v2 - which this license is apparently modeled on - explicitly restricts use by "third parties":

    > "You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service"

    ----

    The Bear license doesn’t include similar language, which could create uncertainty.

    It might help to explicitly clarify that self-hosting for one’s own use is allowed, or to add “third party” wording to the limitations.

    I only raise this because (a) licensing is tricky, and (b) if this feedback helps the author clarify their intended license terms, that’s a win for everyone.

    https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license

  • Medea

    today at 9:01 AM

    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.

We are also entering the age of "hey AI, take this repo, reimplement the same functionality".

Now, no LLM is currently anywhere near doing that for ElasticSearch.

But for a project with 4845 lines of Python code? (as per tokei)

Definitely doable, with a bit of handholding and manual fixing.

Would that be a derivative work? Maybe, but that would be a hard legal battle.

• noinsight

  yesterday at 6:52 PM

  > We are also entering the age of "hey AI, take this repo, reimplement the same functionality".

  Wouldn't you do this just against the/an API documentation? Interesting thought.

• gkbrk

  yesterday at 6:24 PM

  > 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

  • sarlalian

    yesterday at 6:41 PM

    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.

    • SpaceNugget

      today at 11:25 AM

      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.

I certainly get the hurt feelings, but i'm not clear on the license at all.

>Limitations: You may not provide the Software as a hosted or managed service that offers users access to substantial features or functionality.

Where on the spectrum sits an average cookie-cutter VPS provider that comes with an OS package manager that installs the program? Does the VPS provider have to screen the package manager? Does that change if they build a wiki with "1-click-install" that just sends an ssh command to install?

Is this just a requirement to have some theater where an "unaffiliated" third party has to provide the set-up scripts? Or just a rule you can't mention the option during the sales pipeline?

• captainmuon

  yesterday at 5:38 PM

  I think users applies to end-users here. So you must not run the software as a service (either paid or for free) for other users. You are free to use it yourself.

  Crucially, I think what is banned to offer accounts. Offering turnkey-hosting is probably banned in spirit, but the person offering the turnkey-hosting is not in violation, rather the person booking the turnkey hosting and offering the accounts on the instance to third parties is in violation.

  I think the wording is originally against somebody like Amazon hosting e.g. database instances for other people to use, and then giving you an account in that database. It's still OK to rent a VM from them and use the package manager to install it.

  In any way, it is really confusing, in a way a license should not be. And I don't really understand why someone builds a blog platform, which is not monetized, open sources it, but doesn't want other people to host it. If I open source my stuff, I want people to use it. If I want to share the code but don't want people to use it I'd just put it somewhere it with no license at all (all rights reserved).

I understand the reasoning and I also understand the interest of still providing the sources. I'm however curious why the MIT license was chosen instead of the AGPL if competition was a concern

• didibus

  yesterday at 9:17 PM

  AGPL doesn't prevent others from reselling your software no? I thought it only mandated that they also release their own source modifications.

  He seems to claim 3rd parties are offering bearblog commercially without modifications (or with useless modifications, like just a changed name).

• tptacek

  yesterday at 3:20 PM

  Presumably it wasn't a concern when they started and became one later; after all, they changed the license.

I really believe this is the best model or licensing. I care about seeing the code and being able to modify it to suit my own preferences, but I also care about the project being healthy and the maintainer being able to earn from their efforts without worrying about cheap competition.

Even better when a project starts with this model so it doesn't feel like a rug pull or doesn't get messy with forks overshadowing the original product. But I don't feel like Bear had the kind of scale to face this type of reaction.

I use mataroa.blog periodically which is in the same nice and I wish the Bear maintainers fulfillment with their project.

Bear has built a great community, I often find myself looking at blogs on the platform. The trending list is a pretty good news feed of tech-blogger related content: https://bearblog.dev/discover/

Should have re-licensed to the spite license: https://github.com/voynix/spite-license

That's kind of the point of MIT.

The updated license in the BearBlog repo (https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/master/LICEN...) doesn't seem to match the Elastic License very well (https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license).

Have I missed a different source for the license text?

We open source every line of code we legally can at Distrust, and it has paid off in getting us work, even on forks, many many times.

Source code is cheaper than ever, so if you fail to open source first then an open source clone will be created, and your hard work will be irrelevant. Best to have the first open source mover advantage.

This move just told users you are selfish, and breaking the pay it forward chain of goodwill extended by all the developers of the open source libraries your code relies on.

You also just told everyone to park their content on a platform that now has a bus factor of 1, with no option to export and reimport to a compatible fork hosted elsewhere.

If your ability to make a living hinges on open source code like yours not existing, then you are already on too fragile ground to be sustainable, and this looks desperate and will just make more people leave.

While I can be sympathetic to the problem. This seems to a be a text only blog. Is the technical part here truly the big barrier to setting up a competing service?

He talks about his blogging software bearblog.

Bear is still here https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear and open source

This isn't bear, the compilation database building cli tool, for those similarly confused.

• timeforcomputer

  today at 6:10 AM

  Almost the same emoticon logo too.

  ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear vs. ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ Build EAR

  The compilation database tool (https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear), is extremely helpful. It got CCLS/clangd working for me over multiple in-house build systems at a vfx studio.

  It also is super helpful for debugging. I have used it a lot alongside a script which converts a compile_commands.json to a sequence of commands, so I can edit them individually without fiddling with the build system, and then once fixed (such as adding a flag to one TU) try to find the way to do that in the build system.

It isn't obvious from the title or the blog post itself, but it looks like this is some blogging software called Bear, not Bear the markdown notes app for macos and ios, which as far as I know isn't open source anyway

I got this confused with the Bear note-taking app for a minute (https://bear.app/), since it's in a closely adjacent domain and even has similar value statements. Unfortunate naming collision

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

• jorams

  yesterday at 3:58 PM

  > 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.

  • delichon

    yesterday at 4:10 PM

    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?

    • account42

      today at 12:45 PM

      You mean the outfit that has misappropriated the code of those hosted projects to train their commercial code generator which is a very clear violation of the spirit if not the letter of the licenses of many of those projects?

    • yencabulator

      yesterday at 6:17 PM

      Microsoft is the biggest supporter of Microsoft gaining market share.

      • jen20

        yesterday at 7:59 PM

        Red Hat is the biggest supported of Red Hat gaining market share. They are also a big supporter of open source...

        I'm not claiming Microsoft is a good actor (and they certainly produce a whole lot of derpy trash along the way), but the argument itself is not particular sound.

open source is charity. I believe in it, I contribute to it, but I recognize it is unlikely to lead to a sustainable livelihood

• pabs3

  today at 7:35 AM

  There are lots of FOSS consultancies out there doing fairly well, some linked from the FOSSjobs wiki:

  https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

• lemming

  today at 2:30 AM

  I don't know about you, but if I'm going to donate to/work for charity, I'd like to ensure it's for someone who actually needs it rather than the Amazons of the world. I don't feel a pressing need to donate any money or time to them.

  • bigstrat2003

    today at 3:40 AM

    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 cleaned? Because that is what your position here is analogous to, and that seems like a poor line of reasoning to me.

    • lemming

      today at 4:17 AM

      > 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.

• foxglacier

  yesterday at 4:16 PM

  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.

I didn’t know this was a Django application. Love that. Totally understand the author’s point of view, too.

Curious what author would think of separating the service and the core parts and leaving core as open source.

This way someone could create a competing service but they would have to write the entire service layer themselves and a single user would be able to self host the core part.

Also curious what they think about the thiefs not caring about the license and copy pasting it anyway. I don’t think the kind of person that copies your code and tries to sell it would really care about the license

Does anyone know why this says "No javascript, no stylesheets, no trackers. Just your words."

But when you look at the github repo here: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog

It says the repo is 40% CSS and 31% Javascript? Am I misinterpreting what this means in this context?

• jakelazaroff

  today at 2:43 AM

  If you click on the language name, GitHub should take you to a list of all files in that language in the repo. It looks like the JavaScript is basically all admin type stuff.

> We're entering a new age of AI powered coding, where creating a competing product only involves typing "Create a fork of this repo and change its name to something cool and deploy it on an EC2 instance".

I've been curious about how LLMs would impact open source, I have some theories and this is not the only one.

• simmons

  yesterday at 6:01 PM

  I would love to hear your other theories!

  I don't think it would exactly be "create a fork of this repo", but if a developer invests significant time and effort solving hard problems where the solutions are implemented in the released source, once an LLM model is trained on it, then someone else could quickly and easily have the LLM generate a new program that implements the novel solutions. Whether this is a problem or not may depend on the motivations of the developer, but this potential for IP laundering may very well begin influencing the licenses and methods of distribution that people choose.

  (Of course, I suppose at some point AI will be able to analyze and learn from binary executables or obfuscated source...)

I vaguely remember seeing bearblog before. While I can't comment much on the actual article, I do want to applaud how simple it looks. It makes me want to migrate away from ghost to bear or hugo or something without javascript/etc.

• passthejoe

  yesterday at 9:33 PM

  Most static site generators offer a Bear Blog theme, including Hugo and Zola.

  So you can get a self-hosted site that looks and acts like a Bear Blog, but run it yourself with a free software SSG.

It'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).

As much as people tend to hate it, I quite like copyleft licenses on the whole and wouldnt mind it at all for Bearblog, but this particular variation seems a bit odd. I mean I havent heard any problems from Elastic with it so I guess it sorts itself out, it just seems more complicated just AGPL

> This license is almost identical to the MIT license but with the stipulation that the software cannot be provided as a hosted or managed service

Note that while the original change was an additional clause to the MIT license, it was quickly changed to something completely different.[0] Since it no longer permits sublicensing and restricts "remov[ing] or obscur[ing] any licensing, copyright, or other notices in the Software," I believe it's closer to GPL now?

[0]: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/commit/89c3f346ef...

From 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."

• edu

  yesterday at 3:21 PM

  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...

  • dinkleberg

    yesterday at 4:49 PM

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

    • gkbrk

      yesterday at 6:40 PM

      BearBlog built on top of the work of others. Now you can't build on top of the work of BearBlog.

    • KolmogorovComp

      yesterday at 6:36 PM

      The argument is that why should I be able to use software for free but do not want mine to be used the same way?

      • andoando

        yesterday at 7:04 PM

        So everything should be open source and no one should be able to write software to sell it?

        If you want your projects license agreement to be withheld in future projects there is a license for that. Its called copyleft

        • 1gn15

          today at 1:21 AM

          That would be great, actually. AGPL for everything.

• ozgrakkurt

  yesterday at 3:16 PM

  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

  • 1gn15

    today at 1:22 AM

    It's not possible to steal code, since the original author still has it.

    • ozgrakkurt

      today at 6:19 AM

      It depends what it is used for. It is not so simple if they are profiting off it and you start profiting as well by stealing their customers. Maybe it is ok even then, but it sounds like it would be super annoying if the “thief” is just copy pasting the code without adding any value

  • preisschild

    yesterday at 5:03 PM

    If you don't want your work to be "stolen", and instead want to force the people to contribute back, use the AGPL

    • today at 6:20 AM

• iJohnDoe

  today at 12:55 AM

  This really confused the heck out of me. I thought Bear blog was really cool. I saw the GitHub link and had hopes to self-host. Then saw the note that it’s not possible to self-host and closed the tab and never looked back.

  So this whole post on HN is confusing as heck.

  Why post the code at all if you can’t self-host? But apparently you can self-host?!?

  Well, I guess kudos to those that saw the note and downloaded the code anyways and tried to spin it up.

  • indigodaddy

    today at 2:28 AM

    I had exactly the same reaction when I looked at the GitHub a few years ago. I was like, ok well that's weird, and didn't think about bearblog anymore

• phoronixrly

  yesterday at 3:16 PM

  You shouldn't look a gift horse in its mouth. Anything being open-source does not entitle you to be able to easily run it yourself. You are given the source as-is with no warranty. It is up to you to be competent enough to do anything with it and not the responsibility of the authors of the code.

  If this doesn't suit you (as in, if this is a project you can't run, let alone maintain yourself), then you should consider paying someone (preferably the authors) to do so. I know this is novel to many people here who are used to exploiting the free labour of open-source maintainers, but it's been a decider in tech choices I make lately.

  'Can I/anyone else at the company debug an issue and create a bugfix for this cool new open-source tech I want to introduce?' If no, then we are not qualified to run it without external help.

  • indigodaddy

    yesterday at 5:12 PM

    Well I disagree. My take: they wanted their cake and to eat it too. They wanted to be able to say they were free/open source, but really didn't want anyone to be able to utilize the code in any meaningful way. The hobbyist will be turned off because it doesn't look like there is any way to even try it out themselves on their own VPS or hardware. That seems intentional. And now, they change their license so that anyone smart enough to figure it out and make money with it, they not gonna allow that either now. Feels like we know how they really felt from the start, which is they didn't really want anyone to run this code on their own to begin with, but they wanted to still be able to claim "fully open source." IMO, even “disingenuous” is actually a somewhat kind word to how they come off to me.

    • today at 8:39 AM

Maybe unfairly but quite disappointed at this development.

This sentence crystalises open source:

> "Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service."

You make something for everyone. And they may use it as they please. This is what open means. Did the author make something open source with the hope that nobody would actually use the gift that they made?

Mataroa [1] also started with MIT license (directly inspired by bear blog) and it subsequently changed as well but to Affero GPL instead.

[1] https://github.com/mataroablog/mataroa

Why do people go with MIT over a GPL? Would have just releasing it under GPL in the first place also have prevented this?

Don't get me wrong, I have released libraries under MIT before because I have absolutely no problems with others using it even if they want to commercialize it, but I've also released things under GPL3.

• NoGravitas

  today at 12:09 PM

  Even AGPL would not have prevented this; it would just have required anyone else offering Bear as a service to contribute back changes. It would have discouraged larger companies with policies against AGPL from doing so, but not everyone.

Why is there no support for compression?

  $ URL=https://herman.bearblog.dev/
  $ curl -v -H 'Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip, br, zstd' $URL 2>&1 | grep --text ^'< Content-Encoding:\|< Content-Length:\|> Accept-Encoding:'

Hot take but in the era of vibe coding, where you can literally one-shot a clone of bearblog, this comes as a surprise that people are trying to set up paid alternatives to this service trying to hurt his baseline..

Companies in situations like these keep making this blunder when the solution is so right in front of them: use the AGPLv3.

• riffraff

  yesterday at 9:10 PM

  AGPL is not enough to prevent someone providing competing hosting options. They'd need to provide code if they make changes, but competitors are still free to offer the exact same service and not spend anything in development, which reduces the viability of the original project if hosting was the supposed source of income.

  So the original project wants to restrict user freedoms, i.e. they _do not_ want the project to be open source; it's a legit choice, even if I personally prefer free software.

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.

>It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it.

No, you don't believe in open source, hypocrite.

Open source means anyone can use it, even for commercial purposes, and you knew this from day zero.

Honestly, no sympathy for these people, as this happens over and over again, they actually exploit the very few good intended OSS people. They portray their project as open source initially, to gather sympathy and free work from others, then when they see the $$$ they flip the switch to non-OSS and rub their hands.

• rozab

  yesterday at 6:40 PM

  In this case it's kind of unbelievable how quickly the flip happened. Their 'manifesto'[0] was published only at the start of the year, where they vowed to be an incorruptible bastion of stability in a selfish society focused on short-term thinking. They want Bear to be around in 50 years.

  Then in the last couple weeks or so[1] it seems they saw a bit of a spike, and immediately pulled up the ladder.

  They even criticised this sort of behaviour in their manifesto:

  >We've seen our fair share of open-source projects become sour (see the recent Wordpress drama) or abandoned entirely. We've seen OpenAI become ClosedAI. There's a common thread here. Trust isn't just a legal structure, but a social contract.

  I am actually totally in favor of source available licenses, but in this case it seems counter to all the boasts the developer has made about their platform.[2]

  [0]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/ [1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... [2]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-foreve...

  • riffraff

    yesterday at 9:15 PM

    ironically, Wordpress is still licensed under the GPL even after the kerfuffle.

  • moralestapia

    yesterday at 7:37 PM

    I guess Herman cried to his friends for help now. Pathetic.

    Your evidence is solid, after all, it was the same guy who wrote that just a few months ago.

    That post might be gone soon, "smaht" people are inclined to rewrite history to fit their current mood.

• archagon

  yesterday at 6:27 PM

  Or... maybe they actually need money to keep maintaining the project? Not everyone is out there living a life of leisure.

  If open source purists can't accept that, they'll find their cause gradually shrinking into nothing.

  • moralestapia

    yesterday at 7:31 PM

    [flagged]

    • yesterday at 7:43 PM

The author released it under a do-anything-you-want license. Then was hurt other people used the code for commercial and competitive reasons. The first paragraph showed the root cause was not thinking through licensing in the first place. Now, they've seriously considered it, decided their goals, and re-released it with a mix of generosity and self-interest.

We should probably remind people that licensing is an agreement between them and the other party deciding what can and can't be done. Make sure you've considered things like profit, competitors, source redistribution, etc ahead of time. Then, pick the license that suits your goals best. For many, that's source-available licenses instead of open source.

If competition hurts then yeah, you probably didn't want to be open source to begin with

This screams of uneducated regret with a sprinkling of greed. How do you make your code open source but then not understand what open source is? Or even read the license?

i need a bear alternative that can support images and video embeddings

• qudat

  yesterday at 6:54 PM

  https://prose.sh — serve your blog using ssh. It was inspired by bearblog and others in this ecosystem of minimal blog platforms.

  https://pico.sh includes a suite of other services (some paid) but the business model doesn’t depend on prose in particular.

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

• FinnKuhn

  today at 10:03 AM

  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.

  • RicoElectrico

    today at 10:06 AM

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

I feel like this logo ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ is also sort of just pulled from the open culture and free-ridden as he pleases.

Its interesting that they went with the Elastic License. Maybe this is a leaf in the wind that we're going to see more adoption of the license outside of Elastic. I get it's not a "standard" license, but standard licenses become standard through adoption. Someone has to be early to the party.

• kstrauser

  today at 12:58 AM

  I like the Elastic License. It helps me know which programs to avoid.

> Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service. And it hurts.

I am literally incapable of sympathising with this situation. Seriously, what did you expect to happen?

I don't have experience in the subject but recently listened to a podcast episode discussing the tension between open source and building a sustainable business by Oxide and Friends.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-source-and-capita...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-source-anti-patte...

It's funny this all to do about Yet-Another-Simple/Static-Blog generator or whatever

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I’d like to see a “no jerks” license. It’d be MIT by default, but call out specific bad actors as being disallowed from using the software. That way your average corporate user wouldn’t need to consult a lawyer before adopting

• rs186

  yesterday at 3:41 PM

  It will be as useless in terms of enforcement as "shall be used for good, not evil." https://www.json.org/license.html

  • gpm

    yesterday at 3:49 PM

    I think they're suggesting a license that says "except Apple, Amazon, Google, Huawei, ..." not a license that literally says "no jerks".

    The problem of attempting to enumerate the jerks does seem pretty... insurmountable... to me though.

    • jraph

      yesterday at 3:54 PM

      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?

      • gpm

        yesterday at 3:58 PM

        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...

        • jraph

          yesterday at 4:10 PM

          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…

          • gpm

            yesterday at 4:12 PM

            > 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)

          • jen20

            yesterday at 8:01 PM

            Untrue - all that needs to happen is that future work needs to be released with the new list attached.

  • andrewshadura

    today at 7:37 AM

    This software shall not be used for evil. With the exception of IBM, who, together with their partners and minions, are allowed to use this software for evil.

Thanks for the bear blog.

Considering how LLM companies don't respect licenses, and if your livelihood depends on it, I'd go a step further and only make the source available upon request, under strict agreements about how it's used.

There's a lot of "open-source" nowadays that has nothing to do with the spirit of hacking.

Silly. Globally over half of smartphone users have Android phones. Bear was actually the only thing that kept me in the Apple ecosystem for so long, was really bummed when I switched to Android to have to move to another notes program.

IMO - you are charging money for your app which makes you a business. When you don't listen to the market you forfeit any right to complain when you get your lunch money stolen. Sounds hard but most lessons in business are expensive!

• jolux

  yesterday at 5:18 PM

  That’s a different product — bear.app. This is about bearblog.dev.

  • psionides

    today at 12:19 AM

    Honestly I was really confused about this too…