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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.

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.

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.

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/

> 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.

"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?

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.

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.

>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.

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.

>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...

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.

I strongly believe that the BuSL [1] "Business Source License" is preferrably. It leaves the code as source-available for now, but eventually the code becomes open-source. It gives you a moat from which you can run a business. Or less of a moat, and more of a time-distorting slow motion field that your competitors are 4 years behind.

This is the license Hashicorp used. It means that abandoned projects never need to die. It means that the source code is publically available now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License

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?

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.

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

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/

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?

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

We, as in developers, need to understand that permissive licenses are about "developer" freedom, and copyleft licenses are about "user" freedom.

If someone doesn't want their code to be grabbed and ran away with it, they shall use (A)GPL.

Then, nobody can add a "secret sauce" and sit on top of your work and act like they have written all of it and make it proprietary.

Moreover, do not do copyright reassignments and with every new contributor, the license becomes more entrenched in your codebase.

We should stop demonizing copyleft licenses and romanticize permissive licenses. Every inconsiderately permissive licensed code butters corporations and is destined to be closed and their developers got exploited.

We should increase license literacy in Free Software.

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

He talks about his blogging software bearblog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> 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.

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

> 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...

> 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?

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?

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

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).

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

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?

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

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

I was always curious how license changes of these sort work exactly? Like, until that exact commit when the new license is added in, old license is in effect? So someone can commercialize from before that commit (cause MIT)? Also is there any way to fight that, if say you decide to change license, (but the code with old license is already out there), can someone retroactively sue you for using the old code with the more permissive license?

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

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

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."

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

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 have poured so much love into a piece of software to see it turned against you and threaten your livelihood.

I'm confused: how is this their livelihood? I don't see any way to pay them directly nor where they monetize the blogs.

Their pain is real, my question is in good faith, and I explicitly am not disparaging the love they have poured into this project.

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

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:'

> Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip, br, zstd ...

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.

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..

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

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.

That's kind of the point of MIT.

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.

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

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.

There's a reason why some call MIT/BSD licenses "cuck licenses." If you don't want others to profit off your hard work... don't pick a license that lets other profit off your work...

It's odd that this blogging system is using a name also in use by a writing tool:

https://bear.app/

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.

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

I'm glad to hear the new

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!

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