22 ms·

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

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.

omnicognate 1y ago
> 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.
- echoangle 1y ago
  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.
  - jdxcode 1y ago
    Another reason is that copyleft licenses are kryptonite in large organizations.
  - omnicognate 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
    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.
- cinericius 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    I have a strong feeling that speaking to a lawyer might reveal that to be untrue
    - gpm 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        Yeah, but lawyers say that about just about everything
  - shakna 1y ago
    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.
    - gpm 1y ago
      My understanding of the theory that they're advocating is that the AGPL requires that when you modify AGPL software you modify it to provide an offer of its source. And that you can comply with that completely, run the software, and then have a proxy in front that strips that offer without violating the letter of the license. And if that theory works I think "substantial features" of the code could be directly (but for the indirection of that proxy) exposed.
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  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.
  - jakelazaroff 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      This can't possibly be true, since the Linux kernel's code is GPL and approximately every tech company uses Linux.
      - jakelazaroff 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        Phones contain Linux, TVs contain Linux, cars contain Linux, clouds contain Linux. It is used everywhere.
        heavyset_go 1y ago
        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.
- happymellon 1y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      This is a confusing claim. Are you saying the chosen license (<https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/998e87263248d21c8c5b967de0047b0cdf4dc11c/LICENSE.md 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 1y ago
    > 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.
    - foxglacier 1y ago
      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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jakelazaroff 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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/contributors 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    > 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" :)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- _puk 1y ago
  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?
supriyo-biswas 1y ago
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 1y ago
  Because the proprietary software never claimed to be anything but.
  - ahartmetz 1y ago
    Well, Microsoft tried to muddy the waters with "Shared Source". Kind of like Office-Open- wait, Open-Office?-XML.
    - trelane 1y ago
      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-opens-source-code-to-governments.html 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.
Spivak 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - Spivak 1y ago
    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.
  - monocularvision 1y ago
    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 1y ago
wahnfrieden 1y ago
edit: I thought this HN thread was about the Bear app never mind
- jakelazaroff 1y ago
  Bear has no VC investors: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/ https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/
  - wahnfrieden 1y ago
    edit: I thought this HN thread was about the Bear app never mind
    - jakelazaroff 1y ago
      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 1y ago
      No one is, just finish reading the sentence (or start - the op) > Bear, the Apple Design Award winner notes app
    - arp242 1y ago
      Different Bear. https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/ Which you could have known by spending five seconds on https://lambdalpha.com 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 1y ago
        Rampant? Isn't that a pretty extreme response to a mistaken link?
gr4vityWall 1y ago
> 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.
- mynameisvlad 1y ago
  [flagged]
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.)
jraph 1y ago
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.
api 1y ago
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?
benrutter 1y ago
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.
thayne 1y ago
I don't know what the competing forks are, but it definitely doesn't seem like they are from a big megacorp like Amazon.
jaredklewis 1y ago
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.
- NoahZuniga 1y ago
  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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jaredklewis 1y ago
    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.
bachmeier 1y ago
> 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?
- nothrabannosir 1y ago
  Whether they contribute back their changes to their users.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    Then you want free software (a subcategory of open source).
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        “Free software” means copyleft. The free software foundation manages copyleft licenses. The term open source was explicitly coined to differentiate from the more restrictive free software / copyleft. All free software licenses are open source licenses. Not all open source licenses are free software licenses.
        andrewshadura 1y ago
        This statement is incorrect.
singpolyma3 1y ago
If it's source available like this then it's clearly not a "community project"
- sarlalian 1y ago
  If you look at the commit graph, it’s definitely not a community project.
  - Melonai 1y ago
    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.
brookst 1y ago
Perhaps a better term would be “limited use open source”
- rzzzt 1y ago
  closen source?
  - WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
    Peeping source
    - Nevermark 1y ago
      Let's not bring Meta's imaginary source license to violate privacy and Mark Zuckerberg into this.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- yencabulator 1y ago
  That's not open source then.
- cgijoe 1y ago
  The source is ajar.
type0 1y ago
> 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
4ndrewl 1y ago
The existence of a "winner-takes-all dynamic" suggests a market failure, not a marketplace.
zitterbewegung 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    I suspect that any corporation that prohibit GPL will prohibit BearLicence as well. Those usually have a list of approved licenses.
moralestapia 1y ago
>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.
swiftcoder 1y ago
> 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
- jibal 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
      - 1y ago
orthoxerox 1y ago
> 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
pxc 1y ago
> 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.
kelnos 1y ago
> 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 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.
BrenBarn 1y ago
Agreed. There was similar discussion around "the free and open web" on this thread some days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066258 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.
heavyset_go 1y ago
> 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.
tombert 1y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20129285
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Illniyar 1y ago
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.
digdugdirk 1y ago
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.
didibus 1y ago
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.
38 1y ago
[dead]
lmm 1y ago
> 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.
sneak 1y ago
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.
senko 1y ago
> 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
jeswin 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
account42 1y ago
> 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.
saghm 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - saghm 1y ago
    All of those statements are reasonable, but they don't really change the point I'm making from what I can tell. Having trouble marketing "free software" doesn't justify anything about how an entirely separate term should be used.
    - SamInTheShell 1y ago
      I actually put this in the wrong thread. Disregard, I have no clue where the thread I meant to put that was.
aatd86 1y ago
Transparent Source?

omnicognate 1y ago

> 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.

echoangle 1y ago
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.
- jdxcode 1y ago
  Another reason is that copyleft licenses are kryptonite in large organizations.
- omnicognate 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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.
cinericius 1y ago
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 1y ago
  I have a strong feeling that speaking to a lawyer might reveal that to be untrue
  - gpm 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Yeah, but lawyers say that about just about everything
- shakna 1y ago
  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.
  - gpm 1y ago
    My understanding of the theory that they're advocating is that the AGPL requires that when you modify AGPL software you modify it to provide an offer of its source. And that you can comply with that completely, run the software, and then have a proxy in front that strips that offer without violating the letter of the license. And if that theory works I think "substantial features" of the code could be directly (but for the indirection of that proxy) exposed.
ahartmetz 1y ago
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.
- jakelazaroff 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    This can't possibly be true, since the Linux kernel's code is GPL and approximately every tech company uses Linux.
    - jakelazaroff 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        Phones contain Linux, TVs contain Linux, cars contain Linux, clouds contain Linux. It is used everywhere.
        heavyset_go 1y ago
        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.
happymellon 1y ago
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.
- tptacek 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    This is a confusing claim. Are you saying the chosen license (<https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/998e87263248d21c8c5b967de0047b0cdf4dc11c/LICENSE.md 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 1y ago
  > 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.
  - foxglacier 1y ago
    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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jakelazaroff 1y ago

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 1y ago
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/contributors 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  > 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" :)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
_puk 1y ago
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?

supriyo-biswas 1y ago

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 1y ago
Because the proprietary software never claimed to be anything but.
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  Well, Microsoft tried to muddy the waters with "Shared Source". Kind of like Office-Open- wait, Open-Office?-XML.
  - trelane 1y ago
    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-opens-source-code-to-governments.html 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.

Spivak 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.
- Spivak 1y ago
  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.
- monocularvision 1y ago
  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 1y ago

wahnfrieden 1y ago

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

jakelazaroff 1y ago
Bear has no VC investors: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/ https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  edit: I thought this HN thread was about the Bear app never mind
  - jakelazaroff 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    No one is, just finish reading the sentence (or start - the op) > Bear, the Apple Design Award winner notes app
  - arp242 1y ago
    Different Bear. https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/ Which you could have known by spending five seconds on https://lambdalpha.com 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 1y ago
      Rampant? Isn't that a pretty extreme response to a mistaken link?

gr4vityWall 1y ago

> 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.

mynameisvlad 1y ago
[flagged]
ahartmetz 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.)

jraph 1y ago

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.

api 1y ago

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?

benrutter 1y ago

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.

thayne 1y ago

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

jaredklewis 1y ago

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.

NoahZuniga 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jaredklewis 1y ago
  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.

bachmeier 1y ago

> 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?

nothrabannosir 1y ago
Whether they contribute back their changes to their users.
- adastra22 1y ago
  Then you want free software (a subcategory of open source).
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      “Free software” means copyleft. The free software foundation manages copyleft licenses. The term open source was explicitly coined to differentiate from the more restrictive free software / copyleft. All free software licenses are open source licenses. Not all open source licenses are free software licenses.
      - andrewshadura 1y ago
        This statement is incorrect.

singpolyma3 1y ago

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

sarlalian 1y ago
If you look at the commit graph, it’s definitely not a community project.
- Melonai 1y ago
  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.

brookst 1y ago

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

rzzzt 1y ago
closen source?
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  Peeping source
  - Nevermark 1y ago
    Let's not bring Meta's imaginary source license to violate privacy and Mark Zuckerberg into this.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
yencabulator 1y ago
That's not open source then.
cgijoe 1y ago
The source is ajar.

type0 1y ago

> 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

4ndrewl 1y ago

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

zitterbewegung 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  I suspect that any corporation that prohibit GPL will prohibit BearLicence as well. Those usually have a list of approved licenses.

moralestapia 1y ago

>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.

swiftcoder 1y ago

> 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

jibal 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
    - 1y ago

orthoxerox 1y ago

> 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

pxc 1y ago

> 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.

kelnos 1y ago

> 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 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.

BrenBarn 1y ago

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

heavyset_go 1y ago

> 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.

tombert 1y ago

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

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Illniyar 1y ago

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.

digdugdirk 1y ago

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.

didibus 1y ago

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.

38 1y ago

[dead]

lmm 1y ago

> 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.

sneak 1y ago

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.

senko 1y ago

> 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

jeswin 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.

account42 1y ago

> 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.

saghm 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.
- saghm 1y ago
  All of those statements are reasonable, but they don't really change the point I'm making from what I can tell. Having trouble marketing "free software" doesn't justify anything about how an entirely separate term should be used.
  - SamInTheShell 1y ago
    I actually put this in the wrong thread. Disregard, I have no clue where the thread I meant to put that was.

aatd86 1y ago

Transparent Source?