It sounds like the developer wanted all the benefits they get by saying their project is open source, but didn't actually want to deal with the reality of what it means for a project to be open...
Exemplary
It sounds like the developer wanted all the benefits they get by saying their project is open source, but didn't actually want to deal with the reality of what it means for a project to be open source.
Other people being able to modify and distribute your code is the entire point.
They claim they "believe in open source" and then got "bitten by it". In actuality it seems like they never believed in open source in the first place. Open source is a philosophy. It's based on the belief that I should be allowed to know what runs on my computer, and I should be allowed to freely modify the behaviour of code running on my computer, because it's MY computer. If there are restrictions on my ability to modify code on my computer, then it stops really being my computer: I am giving the developers of whatever program I'm running power over my computer.
I think what happened here is that the developer realised that the open source philosophy at its core is incompatible with the capitalist commercialism mindset. The notion of writing code, freely sharing it, and letting others modify and contribute so that everyone can benefit, is too socialist. Everyone benefits, but no one person profits. If you see other people improving upon your code as a threat to your status rather than a mutually beneficial development, then you shouldn't make your code open source. It's as simple as that.
Again, as I mentioned here there is more nuance to it. Importantly, they are running the platform basically for free. I think your points about capitalism and collaboration miss the mark on what's...
I think what happened here is that the developer realised that the open source philosophy at its core is incompatible with the capitalist commercialism mindset.
Again, as I mentioned here there is more nuance to it. Importantly, they are running the platform basically for free.
If you see other people improving upon your code as a threat to your status rather than a mutually beneficial development, then you shouldn't make your code open source. It's as simple as that. That's also not really what is happening here either.
I think your points about capitalism and collaboration miss the mark on what's happening here.
Permissive open-source licenses like MIT are often very compatible with a "capitalist commercialism mindset". They allow anyone, this includes large companies, to profit from open-source work without any obligation to contribute back. That's the "free-riding" I believe Herman remarks to.
In that context, it very much is not a case of "other people improving upon your code", as there is none of that happening to begin with. The problem he described is others taking the code with minimal changes to launch a paid, competing service. That's not community improvement at all. It is just plain commercialization without collaboration. Making this change of the license less about rejecting open-source philosophy and more about protecting the project from being commercially exploited by non-contributors.
And as I said in my other comment, sure you can still be critical about their initial choice of license. But I also feel like we shouldn't put projects like this in the same category as actual open-source rug pulls. Pretending we are living in such a binary reality, I believe strongly to be more hurtful to discourse about open-source.
I agree, and I should say that I think open source projects absolutely have a place in the commercial space, but even then it all comes back to making money at some stage. Big companies can...
Permissive open-source licenses like MIT are often very compatible with a "capitalist commercialism mindset". They allow anyone, this includes large companies, to profit from open-source work without any obligation to contribute back. That's the "free-riding" I believe Herman remarks to.
I agree, and I should say that I think open source projects absolutely have a place in the commercial space, but even then it all comes back to making money at some stage. Big companies can release open source projects for a variety of reasons, but it's always because it works better from a business standpoint, either directly or indirectly. That isn't a problem in and of itself of course, it's just how the world works. But you can only make money in FOSS by having some form of paid product alongside the open source work, whether it be a proprietary application that works in tandem with it (e.g. Microsoft with .NET, VSCodium, etc), distributing the code via CDs or some other medium (which is basically how GNU kept afloat for a long time), or simply asking for donations.
I could have worded my point better here, I think. What I meant was, it's one thing to declare your work as free for all to use and modify how they want; it's another thing to see people actually using and modifying your work how they want. Especially if, as is often the case, people can take your work and make it better than you ever could. But that's just the nature of open source: You can't just own free (libre) software. It's not a product, it belongs to the people. If it doesn't belong to the people, it stops being truly free software.
The problem he described is others taking the code with minimal changes to launch a paid, competing service. That's not community improvement at all. It is just plain commercialization without collaboration.
Like you said I think the big issue here is that they should never have picked the MIT license if they didn't want people to repackage and commercialise their software in this manner. The MIT license allows this sort of thing by design. It's a feature, not a bug. The implication in their blog post is that they feel their code is being stolen by people who want to make a competing service but don't want to put the effort in to make their service good, so they're just hijacking the Bear codebase ("free-riding", as they say). I disagree with the notion that they are being stolen from in any way, or that their work is being exploited. In their own blog post the developer says:
While Bear's code is good, what makes the platform special is the people who use it, and the commitment to longevity.
And I think that this line encapsulates the dissonance in this entire annoucement. The code is only one part of the service. There's no reason why bearblog.dev shouldn't have been able to run perfectly well with the code licensed the way it was, no matter what other sites did with it.
It seems to me that Herman made a site, and the site did well. It was open source and free to use, and he was proud of his work. He wanted open source from the start for its transparency and, presumably, because a lot of people will hold open source projects in higher regard than closed source ones. They didn't consider that their project being open source meant that it stops being their project, one that they alone are in control of. And once people started forking the project and deciding to host their own versions of the site, rather than seeing it as a net positive for the community, where his work was allowing for others to achieve their goals easier, he saw it as people ripping off his work. That, I think, is the sticking point. Whether intentionally or not, they advertised their code as being something that anyone can view, modify, and distribute themselves, and now they're going back on that promise.
In the end this whole thing comes down to the initial choice of license. Licenses are complicated, and I can't entirely fault the developer for picking one at the start without fully understanding the ramifications of it. That being said, the MIT license is short, and they had a long time to figure this stuff out.
But I also feel like we shouldn't put projects like this in the same category as actual open-source rug pulls. Pretending we are living in such a binary reality, I believe strongly to be more hurtful to discourse about open-source.
I don't think the motive matters, whether it's a sole developer feeling overly protective of code they've written, or a big company deciding to lock down a major project once they've cultivated a community that can't easily break out of the ecosystem. In both cases it's a restriction of freedom for the consumer. And perhaps I'm just a FOSS zealot (well, no, I most definitely am, and I imagine we'll have to simply agree to disagree on this point), but I think it matters now more than ever that user freedom is respected to the highest extent, no half measures. We're witnessing everyone in power, governments, corporations, billionaires, all trying to control more and more of our lives, and our computer usage especially. I think it's more important than ever that we fight for our digital freedom, in all its forms.
That's a well reasoned position. I just think we fundamentally disagree on one key point. You are saying that you don't think motive matters, but I strongly believe context is extremely important....
Exemplary
That's a well reasoned position. I just think we fundamentally disagree on one key point. You are saying that you don't think motive matters, but I strongly believe context is extremely important.
We're witnessing everyone in power, governments, corporations, billionaires,
By saying that motive doesn't matter, you are placing Herman in the same category. A solo developer, who provides a free service and effectively is the projects sole contributor.
One is the a creator trying to prevent their work from being commercially exploited by others without contribution, the others are powerful entities on a whole different magnitude of scale. I strongly believe that conflating the two dilutes the argument for user freedom.
You also argue that he is "going back on that promise". But I also think we should consider if that is true. The license change isn't retroactive. Anyone is still free to take the last MIT-licensed version and fork it. That promise is preserved. He is changing the terms for his future labor on the project.
If the FOSS philosophy is truly about freedom, it seems odd to deny the creator the freedom to correct what they see as a mistake in their licensing choice for their own future work. Being "stuck" with a poor choice forever doesn't sound like freedom to me.
Applying a rigid, absolutist FOSS philosophy here seems to miss the forest for the trees, and it ends up punishing a creator who appears to be acting in good faith to sustain a project for his community.
Even more so because while we'd like to think it is about the open source license change. Realistically, that isn't why people historically get upset when a project changes their license to be less open. If there is an active community behind it, a fork will pop up over time and often take over where the old project left off. But, it takes a while before such a fork is established, as the old project also takes away the entire infrastructure with it, there are multiple forks, etc. So it takes a while for things to stabilize for the people depending on the code itself.
None of that is applicable here. As I said in the other comment, Herman already didn't accept external contributions to the bear source code. There is no community of users who depend on it in the same way as is true for other open source projects.
This is an excellent point and one that I should have addressed. From an ideological point of view I fully agree: Herman has every right to restrict the usage of his software if he so chooses....
If the FOSS philosophy is truly about freedom, it seems odd to deny the creator the freedom to correct what they see as a mistake in their licensing choice for their own future work. Being "stuck" with a poor choice forever doesn't sound like freedom to me.
This is an excellent point and one that I should have addressed. From an ideological point of view I fully agree: Herman has every right to restrict the usage of his software if he so chooses. Just like how nobody can force me to use my computer a certain way, nobody should be able to force him to manage his code in a certain way.
On a practical level however, it is an annoying thing to deal with as a user. It's unlikely that every Bear user will notice this change, and a lot of people who do probably won't bother moving their blog someplace else over it. For most this will be an annoying, but ultimately mild issue.
In a Stallman-approved GNU/Hurd ideal world, the whole Bear userbase would jump ship to a fork of the project with a free license, and Bear would be left to die in proprietary shame. In the real world, that obviously won't happen (and that's probably for the best). The practical outcome of this change is likely not going to amount to much. A few people will get mad and leave. Most won't though, because Bear is still a quality blogging platform at the end of the day, ran by someone who does seem to care about their site's users. But most importantly, people won't move because it's a pain in the ass to move to a new platform, and most won't care that much. Apathy is a powerful thing, unfortunately.
Like you said, this change is not a retroactive one; people are free to fork the code and go about their business on another site. But a platform like Bear is not just a bundle of source code: It's a group of creators, a set of domains, a server running somewhere (which, of course, Herman is allowed to use in whatever way he wishes as well, since he owns the computer), an environment to create in. All of those things and more are why people choose to use it. Anyone who cares about this license change now has to contend with leaving all of that, or deciding it's not a huge deal and sticking put. In that sense I do think this is a bit of a "rug pull", so to speak. Not an intentional one by any means, I don't think the devs were planning all along to entrap a userbase by luring them in with the promise of FOSS and then trusting that apathy will keep them onboard once their intentions were revealed. But, well, that is the strategy that gets used by "the bad guys". Start with something great, garner an audience, then chip away at user freedoms bit by bit, enough that people never get enraged, just mildly angry before forgetting, and once they've forgotten, chip away again. We're seeing it play out with privacy laws, desktop/mobile operating systems, voter's rights, and far more.
Is Bear going from a permissive FOSS license to a slightly more restricted source-available one the same thing as Big Tech pushing mass surveillance? Absolutely not, it's nowhere even remotely close. I would still use Bear over an equivalent Google service in a hearbeat if I had to choose one or the other. But it's something where if I had to choose between one or the other (and of course, I don't have to in reality), I would be compromising something in either case. Again, it's an astronomical difference between the two. But as far as a "rigid, absolutist FOSS philosophy" goes, the zealots among us would have to say no to both. I'm not a Free Software fanatic, I'll connect to the wifi in other peoples' houses without inspecting their router, I'll watch Youtube videos occasionally. But I think that FOSS absolutism is something we should, at least, aspire toward when we can, and I think that in situations like this where a service that people use takes a step back from that ideal, they shouldn't simply let it happen.
I guess what I don't understand, and why I resonate more with the less forgiving views of this license change, is what does Bear gain by cutting off access to competing services? How do the...
I guess what I don't understand, and why I resonate more with the less forgiving views of this license change, is what does Bear gain by cutting off access to competing services? How do the "free-riding" services take anything away from Bear? I don't understand the motivation. The implication is there is something financial going on (he complains that the competing services are threatening his livelihood), but as you said in your other post, Bear is a free service, so what is the actual threat there? Is this whole move just out of spite?
From the outside this looks exactly like what ConalFisher describes--he chose the MIT license and claims to be a proponent of open source, but as soon as the 100% predictable outcome of choosing that license happened he got butthurt and did a 180. It's not the kind of move you'd expect to see from someone who is actually knowledgable about and invested in open source, and the reasons he gives don't really pass the smell test. It's just not a great look from any angle you view it from.
I think that what you are overlooking is that it is a mix of practical and personal concerns. Practically speaking, having clones pop up can confuse users, dilute the brand and fragment the...
I think that what you are overlooking is that it is a mix of practical and personal concerns.
Practically speaking, having clones pop up can confuse users, dilute the brand and fragment the community he says is the most valuable part of bear. The livelihood here might not be about direct income from the blog. But the project is closely tied to his professional identity and company, something he mentioned in an earlier blog post.
But beyond that, there is a human element here, one based on emotion. When you pour years of effort into a passion project, seeing it copied with minimal changes and sold by others can just feel violating. Dismissing that very human reaction as someone being "butthurt" overlooks why people create things in the first place.
I do agree that Herman might place too much value in bad actors running clones of bearblog. At the same time I understand where he is coming from and considering the context I really think it shouldn't be so controversial as people make it out to be.
I didn't mean to imply that I see this as some kind of huge controversy--for example if he made it closed-source or chose a more restrictive license that forbade commercial use in the first place...
I didn't mean to imply that I see this as some kind of huge controversy--for example if he made it closed-source or chose a more restrictive license that forbade commercial use in the first place that would be perfectly reasonable. The aspect of this that looks hypocritical to me is that Bear's source code started under a permissive license, which would be a selling point to people who value FOSS as a philosophy and potentially enticed some of those people to sign up, but that license was clearly chosen without understanding the consequences or actually adhering to the principles it implied. It is a bit of a rug-pull to those specific (possibly hypothetical) users whose decision to sign up was influenced by the belief that the choice in license was a well-informed one--a fairly mild rug-pull, granted, but a rug-pull nonetheless.
Exactly. I flat out stop using any software that tries to garner support from the FOSS world by being open, and then suddenly get an attack of the greed and close shop. It's fundamentally wrong....
Exactly. I flat out stop using any software that tries to garner support from the FOSS world by being open, and then suddenly get an attack of the greed and close shop. It's fundamentally wrong.
Want to develop closed source software and never release? That's fine. I think my editor of choice, Sublime Text is like that. No issues.
Write useful software that people end up relying on, then relicense it to their detriment? Eat rocks.
Every choice to use FOSS should be well informed to recognize that the contributor(s) can stop contributing at any time. This is no different. I don't see why the onus of being informed should...
It is a bit of a rug-pull to those specific (possibly hypothetical) users whose decision to sign up was influenced by the belief that the choice in license was a well-informed one--a fairly mild rug-pull, granted, but a rug-pull nonetheless.
Every choice to use FOSS should be well informed to recognize that the contributor(s) can stop contributing at any time. This is no different. I don't see why the onus of being informed should solely fall on the person who is freely providing their time and efforts.
Why shouldn't the perspective of this be along the lines of the contributor stopped contributing to the project, and is now contributing to a different project? Yes, I realize it's the same technical project under a different license, but the license dictates how the contributor wants their contributions to be used and therefore should treated as equal to any other project where the contributor changes where they place their contributions.
I do think that means the users should take into account, just like they would an abandoned project, the long-term reliability of any other projects from that contributor and that would be part of an informed choice on their part whether they would use or engage with such projects. I believe this was an early concern of uBlock Origin to some extent because the creator of this abandoned his original project uBlock and left it in the hands of someone he didn't really know that well which also impacted all the users of that project by giving someone else access to their systems by way of being able to publish changes to the extension in undesirable ways. Of course its been a long time since that happened and those aren't generally seen as relevant concerns anymore (not that they were massive concerns at the time because the explanation given by the creator was seen as reasonable and understandable as well as showing greater awareness to that situation).
Is uBlock Origin not a worthy project simply because the guy who started it didn't make the smartest most informed decisions when he started with uBlock? People make mistakes and sometimes learn from those mistakes.
I agree with that, and I think I agree with everything else you said. I do not agree with the implication that users should just roll with the punches and have no right to get upset or voice their...
Every choice to use FOSS should be well informed to recognize that the contributor(s) can stop contributing at any time.
I agree with that, and I think I agree with everything else you said. I do not agree with the implication that users should just roll with the punches and have no right to get upset or voice their disagreement when licensing or ownership drama occurs. Users have a right to voice their opinion and be informed by the opinion of others. In fact I think pointing these things out and raising awareness (just like what's going on in this thread) is super important. I don't think anyone is claiming (or at least I am not trying to claim) that Bear is an "unworthy" platform as a result of the license change, or that Bear does not have the right to make the change. Just pointing out that it's kinda a dick move.
You are confusing Free Software and Open Source. Free Software prioritizes user freedoms above all else. Open Source is a non-confrontational, pragmatic and business-focused movement that extols...
Open source is a philosophy. It's based on the belief that I should be allowed to know what runs on my computer, and I should be allowed to freely modify the behaviour of code running on my computer, because it's MY computer. If there are restrictions on my ability to modify code on my computer, then it stops really being my computer: I am giving the developers of whatever program I'm running power over my computer.
You are confusing Free Software and Open Source.
Free Software prioritizes user freedoms above all else. Open Source is a non-confrontational, pragmatic and business-focused movement that extols the benefits of an open development process from the businesses' point of view.
We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape.
In other words, Open Source being friendly to businesses isn't a second-order effect that fell out of moral obligation to its users. Instead, the point was to promote the use of an open development process to businesses, so they could take advantage of free labor, without the "confrontational" moral arguments concerning user freedom. And the sponsors of the OSI are certainly getting their money's worth.
In my opinion, Open Source licenses are ill-suited for any individual, community, or small business software project unless:
You don't particularly care that you're giving away free labor to large corporations, or your competition.
You are a large corporation and have enough resources to steer a project and ignore the needs of the community.
Unfortunately, I suspect most developers default to MIT out of habit, not thinking the project will go anywhere, or remembering a time where a copyleft or source-available license prevented them from using a particular piece of software, and only discover the downsides of Open Source after they've personally been bitten.
I have been conflating the two terms here; I figured it wasn't worth getting bogged down with semantics, but you are correct, I've been generally talking about Free Software rather than Open...
You are confusing Free Software and Open Source.
I have been conflating the two terms here; I figured it wasn't worth getting bogged down with semantics, but you are correct, I've been generally talking about Free Software rather than Open Source software. Though in retrospect it's probably a safe bet that people on the Tech subforum of Tildes in a thread about code licensing would be able to discern the two terms.
I only point it out because it's not a small distinction, it's a very fundamental differences in the baseline set of morals that underpin the two. And if I'm being honest, I don't blame people for...
Though in retrospect it's probably a safe bet that people on the Tech subforum of Tildes in a thread about code licensing would be able to discern the two terms.
I only point it out because it's not a small distinction, it's a very fundamental differences in the baseline set of morals that underpin the two.
And if I'm being honest, I don't blame people for getting them conflated. The Free Software Foundation has been a horrendous steward of Free Software and Copyleft over the past few decades, and has essentially sat back and let Open Source eat its lunch after releasing a compromised version of the GPL that was at once too principled for some (Tivoization) and didn't go far enough in the parts that actually mattered (The network hole).
Maybe it's just phrasing, but this boggles me because open source is evidently highly compatible with a capitalist mindset. The proliferation of licenses like the one the author used initially has...
I think what happened here is that the developer realised that the open source philosophy at its core is incompatible with the capitalist commercialism mindset.
Maybe it's just phrasing, but this boggles me because open source is evidently highly compatible with a capitalist mindset. The proliferation of licenses like the one the author used initially has created a massive commons that can be nearly freely capitalized on by anyone, also in ways that are antithetical to the philosophy you describe above. I can attest that most of the proprietary, closed source, commercial software I've worked on was built on substantial piles of BSD/MIT licensed libraries.
In my opinion, free software as defined by GNU has a better claim to represent your philosophy in that it meaningfully incentivizes mutually beneficial development and the production of software that users can modify freely, by requiring authors to provide the source code of the modified versions they distribute to others. Especially GPLv3 seems like a commercial dead end, because the people who make computer appliances like Internet Of Shit, set top boxes, NAS etc. really, really don't agree with you on whether you should have any power over your computers, a position to which the MIT license is very agreeable.
I worded that sentence quite poorly, I'll admit. Here's a (hopefully) better-worded elaboration from a reply I made:
I worded that sentence quite poorly, I'll admit. Here's a (hopefully) better-worded elaboration from a reply I made:
I agree, and I should say that I think open source projects absolutely have a place in the commercial space, but even then it all comes back to making money at some stage. Big companies can release open source projects for a variety of reasons, but it's always because it works better from a business standpoint, either directly or indirectly. That isn't a problem in and of itself of course, it's just how the world works. But you can only make money in FOSS by having some form of paid product alongside the open source work, whether it be a proprietary application that works in tandem with it (e.g. Microsoft with .NET, VSCodium, etc), distributing the code via CDs or some other medium (which is basically how GNU kept afloat for a long time), or simply asking for donations.
I could have worded my point better here, I think. What I meant was, it's one thing to declare your work as free for all to use and modify how they want; it's another thing to see people actually using and modifying your work how they want. Especially if, as is often the case, people can take your work and make it better than you ever could. But that's just the nature of open source: You can't just own free (libre) software. It's not a product, it belongs to the people. If it doesn't belong to the people, it stops being truly free software.
But this code doesn't run on your computer, it runs on someone else's computer. It's a web service. What is often misunderstood in discussions about software licensing is that "open source" can...
I should be allowed to freely modify the behaviour of code running on my computer, because it's MY computer.
But this code doesn't run on your computer, it runs on someone else's computer. It's a web service.
What is often misunderstood in discussions about software licensing is that "open source" can mean a lot of different things, and it's up to the creator to define what it means for their specific project. Unless you pay for it, you are not entitled to their work. They can change the license every day if they want, and there is nothing wrong about that. You are not going to demand a cup of coffee every day from your neighbor just because they offered you one once. Stop demanding things from free software developers.
The only criticism I have is that they shouldn't have picked MIT in the first place. It is the license to choose if you want others to profit from your work without giving anything back.
Very true, the Bear developer is free to do whatever they want with the software running on their server. If I were to host my own instance of their FOSS source code, however, they wouldn't have...
But this code doesn't run on your computer, it runs on someone else's computer. It's a web service.
Very true, the Bear developer is free to do whatever they want with the software running on their server. If I were to host my own instance of their FOSS source code, however, they wouldn't have any say on what I could do with it either. My point is that by picking the MIT license (which was almost certainly a mistake on the developer's part, one that they chose to not fix for too long) they allowed people to do whatever they wished with that source code. But now that people are doing whatever they want with it, namely modifying and hosting their own instances, the developer is changing things to make sure that can't happen anymore in the future.
That is, of course, well within their right; nobody can force them to run their own code in a certain way. But the vibe being given off by this whole event is one where the dev chose to publish their code under a permissive FOSS license (as you said, FOSS is a spectrum, but the MIT is a very lax license) without understanding the ramifications of doing so, and when faced with those ramifications they got defensive and decided to ensure that nobody else could copy them in the future. There's nothing wrong with that really, it just comes off a bit, I don't know, disingenuous?
Anyways, I've written like 2000 words in this comments section already, over a piece of software I don't even use, so I'll leave it there. But I do agree with the points you've made here, absolutely.
Ah yes. Pulling up the ladder always works well. I guess there weren't too many contributors to browbeat into allowing the change of license. How long before 'Cub Blog' releases on the last MIT...
Ah yes. Pulling up the ladder always works well. I guess there weren't too many contributors to browbeat into allowing the change of license. How long before 'Cub Blog' releases on the last MIT licenced release and eats their lunch. Maybe they should ask redis? This sort of relicensing of existing projects is disgusting. Don't want your pet project used by people? Well okay, make a closed source one.
But don't make it open, build a community and then slam the door. That's just scummy.
There is honestly a bit more nuance to it than just that. Bear blog itself is a free service and while the license was open source already did not accept contributions for quite a while. Which is...
Basically what I am getting at is that this isn't some sort of big corporate entity trying to pull a rug pull.
There is no effective self-hosted user base of the software itself, as they already operated effectively on the "source available" model. Operated by an individual (not a big corporate entity) who made the source open for people to tinker with personally. Provides the service itself for free and is now finding other entities running with the code and charging people a lot more for it.
If you want to throw some criticism towards them, it is that they possibly should have done their homework better on what the MIT license permits people to do. But I honestly don't think it is fair to throw them in the same category as redis and the likes.
I don't understand how this affects him though. It's not like he's losing revenue because people are deciding to pay for another service for some reason. Like yeah, I guess if lazy people are...
and is now finding other entities running with the code and charging people a lot more for it.
I don't understand how this affects him though. It's not like he's losing revenue because people are deciding to pay for another service for some reason. Like yeah, I guess if lazy people are trying to make money off of something you built, that's pretty shitty, but how does it materially hurt you at all?
Does it have to have a material impact for it to be a valid reason? I'd say that if the point is reached where there is material damage several borders have already been crossed. I suppose some of...
but how does it materially hurt you at all?
Does it have to have a material impact for it to be a valid reason? I'd say that if the point is reached where there is material damage several borders have already been crossed.
I suppose some of it also depends on what you consider to be of material impact. If you have spend a lot of time and energy into making something a reality that shitty experience can also directly impact your future motivation and progress on the thing overall.
While I can empathize with the sort of emotional response, and he can of course do what he wants, I am not sure the threat is actually that big of a deal. But there are some perspectives on how AI...
While I can empathize with the sort of emotional response, and he can of course do what he wants, I am not sure the threat is actually that big of a deal. But there are some perspectives on how AI vibe coding is a challenge for the original spirit of FOSS projects. Another bear blogger responded to this.
The value Bear Blog provides isn't really with its tech, but with the community that is built around it. Someone being able to spin up a copy-cat product is not really something I see as a big threat to what herman has built with Bear Blog. It is like an empty instance of Facebook is pretty worthless in itself, as it won't attract users anyway.
I wouldn't be capable of having my own website so to me value is the tech and Herman himself. It is quite a privilege for a non-programmer to have a company founder as tech support. I try to not...
I wouldn't be capable of having my own website so to me value is the tech and Herman himself. It is quite a privilege for a non-programmer to have a company founder as tech support. I try to not bother him too much but yeah, it's nice. The kind of content I put up is not relevant for Bear's community and I completely removed votes from my posts. So I am definitely there for the tech and the Hermann.
I am a happy customer of bearblog. I am in constant contact with the founder and maintainer because I am ignorant about programming. He treats me like I am an human which I appreciate. He also...
I am a happy customer of bearblog. I am in constant contact with the founder and maintainer because I am ignorant about programming. He treats me like I am an human which I appreciate. He also provides a discount for Brazil which I also appreciate. I fully support his decision to choose whatever license is required for him to be able to sustain himself financially.
As a bearblog user, Herman's post strikes me in an odd way. I can understand how it might feel to see people take your open-source code and set up their own paid services, when you're running a...
As a bearblog user, Herman's post strikes me in an odd way.
I can understand how it might feel to see people take your open-source code and set up their own paid services, when you're running a service yourself. But why does this "hurt"? If you chose a freely open license to begin with and other people take your code and build their own products with it... that's fully in the spirit of the license you originally chose. Also wouldn't you be glad that more people are using your code and doing their own things with it? Sure, there's no requirement for them to contribute back, necessarily, or make any major modifications, and I get how that can feel like just being "copied"... but this whole response just seems off to me and against the entire spirit of the licensing they chose in the first place
I suppose it's all about perspective and I don't think making something open-source and then seeing other uses as a threat makes any sense. I guess the one thing I can agree with is if Herman's not open to a change in perspective, then yes, indeed, they absolutely chose the wrong license and yes, if they're interested in protecting their work at all costs commercially, then the "right" move is to change licensing, but they should have known this from the beginning. They certainly have the "right" or freedom to change the licensing, I'm not arguing that. I'm simply arguing that I think their perspective is off.
I get the whole thing with AI coding and all that, and sure there are people that would take existing code, use AI garbage to modify and make their own thing. As someone vehemently anti-AI, I can empathize. But seeing any competition (or alternative communities) to your own service/community as a threat / negative thing though is what I just don't vibe with... and not to mention, the cat's already out of the bag, and doing a switch after-the-fact instead of making better choices in the first place, kinda just makes this a mess, and leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I've already been considering changing hosts, and going with a more static-based site. I need more flexibility than the service offers at this point. Maybe it's time.
And bear is not an only-free-option service. Its base tier is free, but it has a paid tier also (which I pay for). So I think the potential of competition to his paid tier of bearblog from other services based on the code is likely playing into his perception of a threat.
(and I'm not even a zealous proponent of open-source that constantly preaches or always looks for open source (and although probably not enforceable, for certain things, I prefer custom licenses that disallow corporate use, etc.) but I think this is an unnecessarily negative view of the behavior of others when it comes to open-source code)- no one is stabbing you in the back by doing things with your source that your licensing freely allows them to do...
People seem to think that free-riding is an undesirable side effect of open source when actually, it's all about copying other people's homework. When we release software under an open source...
People seem to think that free-riding is an undesirable side effect of open source when actually, it's all about copying other people's homework. When we release software under an open source license, it's a gift to the world. The world includes some terrible people, but hopefully it works out in the end.
Maybe this seems like a bad deal? If so, it's perfectly fine to change your mind and use a different license from now on.
If the author wants to no longer make his project open source, that’s fine, in the end. That being said, I do wonder if they’re overvaluing their own source code. To be honest, a microblogging...
If the author wants to no longer make his project open source, that’s fine, in the end.
That being said, I do wonder if they’re overvaluing their own source code. To be honest, a microblogging service is something a developer can whip up in an afternoon. There’s probably sufficient material online that an LLM agent could write one completely independently. I don’t think there’s really all that much point gatekeeping it.
But that's kind of the issue isnt it? An llm is able to write one independently because its built off of repositories like bear blog... In this case youre just moving the profit and community...
But that's kind of the issue isnt it? An llm is able to write one independently because its built off of repositories like bear blog...
In this case youre just moving the profit and community interaction from an individual to a massive, government meddling corporation. There is no qualm here with people building their own microblogging platforms, even using his source as inspiration or whatever. Its with bad actors who are now just rewarded by the system. Its an emotional, knee jerk reaction to the reality of foss or creative enterprise in general these days.
Exactly, that was also my first thought. I think what made people choose Bearblog was the fact that it’s run by a human being and not a big corporation, its plan for longevity and the care that...
Exactly, that was also my first thought.
I think what made people choose Bearblog was the fact that it’s run by a human being and not a big corporation, its plan for longevity and the care that it’s being put in it. Those things couldn’t be simply copied.
It sounds like the developer wanted all the benefits they get by saying their project is open source, but didn't actually want to deal with the reality of what it means for a project to be open source.
Other people being able to modify and distribute your code is the entire point.
They claim they "believe in open source" and then got "bitten by it". In actuality it seems like they never believed in open source in the first place. Open source is a philosophy. It's based on the belief that I should be allowed to know what runs on my computer, and I should be allowed to freely modify the behaviour of code running on my computer, because it's MY computer. If there are restrictions on my ability to modify code on my computer, then it stops really being my computer: I am giving the developers of whatever program I'm running power over my computer.
I think what happened here is that the developer realised that the open source philosophy at its core is incompatible with the capitalist commercialism mindset. The notion of writing code, freely sharing it, and letting others modify and contribute so that everyone can benefit, is too socialist. Everyone benefits, but no one person profits. If you see other people improving upon your code as a threat to your status rather than a mutually beneficial development, then you shouldn't make your code open source. It's as simple as that.
Again, as I mentioned here there is more nuance to it. Importantly, they are running the platform basically for free.
I think your points about capitalism and collaboration miss the mark on what's happening here.
Permissive open-source licenses like MIT are often very compatible with a "capitalist commercialism mindset". They allow anyone, this includes large companies, to profit from open-source work without any obligation to contribute back. That's the "free-riding" I believe Herman remarks to.
In that context, it very much is not a case of "other people improving upon your code", as there is none of that happening to begin with. The problem he described is others taking the code with minimal changes to launch a paid, competing service. That's not community improvement at all. It is just plain commercialization without collaboration. Making this change of the license less about rejecting open-source philosophy and more about protecting the project from being commercially exploited by non-contributors.
And as I said in my other comment, sure you can still be critical about their initial choice of license. But I also feel like we shouldn't put projects like this in the same category as actual open-source rug pulls. Pretending we are living in such a binary reality, I believe strongly to be more hurtful to discourse about open-source.
I agree, and I should say that I think open source projects absolutely have a place in the commercial space, but even then it all comes back to making money at some stage. Big companies can release open source projects for a variety of reasons, but it's always because it works better from a business standpoint, either directly or indirectly. That isn't a problem in and of itself of course, it's just how the world works. But you can only make money in FOSS by having some form of paid product alongside the open source work, whether it be a proprietary application that works in tandem with it (e.g. Microsoft with .NET, VSCodium, etc), distributing the code via CDs or some other medium (which is basically how GNU kept afloat for a long time), or simply asking for donations.
I could have worded my point better here, I think. What I meant was, it's one thing to declare your work as free for all to use and modify how they want; it's another thing to see people actually using and modifying your work how they want. Especially if, as is often the case, people can take your work and make it better than you ever could. But that's just the nature of open source: You can't just own free (libre) software. It's not a product, it belongs to the people. If it doesn't belong to the people, it stops being truly free software.
Like you said I think the big issue here is that they should never have picked the MIT license if they didn't want people to repackage and commercialise their software in this manner. The MIT license allows this sort of thing by design. It's a feature, not a bug. The implication in their blog post is that they feel their code is being stolen by people who want to make a competing service but don't want to put the effort in to make their service good, so they're just hijacking the Bear codebase ("free-riding", as they say). I disagree with the notion that they are being stolen from in any way, or that their work is being exploited. In their own blog post the developer says:
And I think that this line encapsulates the dissonance in this entire annoucement. The code is only one part of the service. There's no reason why bearblog.dev shouldn't have been able to run perfectly well with the code licensed the way it was, no matter what other sites did with it.
It seems to me that Herman made a site, and the site did well. It was open source and free to use, and he was proud of his work. He wanted open source from the start for its transparency and, presumably, because a lot of people will hold open source projects in higher regard than closed source ones. They didn't consider that their project being open source meant that it stops being their project, one that they alone are in control of. And once people started forking the project and deciding to host their own versions of the site, rather than seeing it as a net positive for the community, where his work was allowing for others to achieve their goals easier, he saw it as people ripping off his work. That, I think, is the sticking point. Whether intentionally or not, they advertised their code as being something that anyone can view, modify, and distribute themselves, and now they're going back on that promise.
In the end this whole thing comes down to the initial choice of license. Licenses are complicated, and I can't entirely fault the developer for picking one at the start without fully understanding the ramifications of it. That being said, the MIT license is short, and they had a long time to figure this stuff out.
I don't think the motive matters, whether it's a sole developer feeling overly protective of code they've written, or a big company deciding to lock down a major project once they've cultivated a community that can't easily break out of the ecosystem. In both cases it's a restriction of freedom for the consumer. And perhaps I'm just a FOSS zealot (well, no, I most definitely am, and I imagine we'll have to simply agree to disagree on this point), but I think it matters now more than ever that user freedom is respected to the highest extent, no half measures. We're witnessing everyone in power, governments, corporations, billionaires, all trying to control more and more of our lives, and our computer usage especially. I think it's more important than ever that we fight for our digital freedom, in all its forms.
That's a well reasoned position. I just think we fundamentally disagree on one key point. You are saying that you don't think motive matters, but I strongly believe context is extremely important.
By saying that motive doesn't matter, you are placing Herman in the same category. A solo developer, who provides a free service and effectively is the projects sole contributor.
One is the a creator trying to prevent their work from being commercially exploited by others without contribution, the others are powerful entities on a whole different magnitude of scale. I strongly believe that conflating the two dilutes the argument for user freedom.
You also argue that he is "going back on that promise". But I also think we should consider if that is true. The license change isn't retroactive. Anyone is still free to take the last MIT-licensed version and fork it. That promise is preserved. He is changing the terms for his future labor on the project.
If the FOSS philosophy is truly about freedom, it seems odd to deny the creator the freedom to correct what they see as a mistake in their licensing choice for their own future work. Being "stuck" with a poor choice forever doesn't sound like freedom to me.
Applying a rigid, absolutist FOSS philosophy here seems to miss the forest for the trees, and it ends up punishing a creator who appears to be acting in good faith to sustain a project for his community.
Even more so because while we'd like to think it is about the open source license change. Realistically, that isn't why people historically get upset when a project changes their license to be less open. If there is an active community behind it, a fork will pop up over time and often take over where the old project left off. But, it takes a while before such a fork is established, as the old project also takes away the entire infrastructure with it, there are multiple forks, etc. So it takes a while for things to stabilize for the people depending on the code itself.
None of that is applicable here. As I said in the other comment, Herman already didn't accept external contributions to the bear source code. There is no community of users who depend on it in the same way as is true for other open source projects.
Again, context matters as far as I am concerned.
This is an excellent point and one that I should have addressed. From an ideological point of view I fully agree: Herman has every right to restrict the usage of his software if he so chooses. Just like how nobody can force me to use my computer a certain way, nobody should be able to force him to manage his code in a certain way.
On a practical level however, it is an annoying thing to deal with as a user. It's unlikely that every Bear user will notice this change, and a lot of people who do probably won't bother moving their blog someplace else over it. For most this will be an annoying, but ultimately mild issue.
In a Stallman-approved GNU/Hurd ideal world, the whole Bear userbase would jump ship to a fork of the project with a free license, and Bear would be left to die in proprietary shame. In the real world, that obviously won't happen (and that's probably for the best). The practical outcome of this change is likely not going to amount to much. A few people will get mad and leave. Most won't though, because Bear is still a quality blogging platform at the end of the day, ran by someone who does seem to care about their site's users. But most importantly, people won't move because it's a pain in the ass to move to a new platform, and most won't care that much. Apathy is a powerful thing, unfortunately.
Like you said, this change is not a retroactive one; people are free to fork the code and go about their business on another site. But a platform like Bear is not just a bundle of source code: It's a group of creators, a set of domains, a server running somewhere (which, of course, Herman is allowed to use in whatever way he wishes as well, since he owns the computer), an environment to create in. All of those things and more are why people choose to use it. Anyone who cares about this license change now has to contend with leaving all of that, or deciding it's not a huge deal and sticking put. In that sense I do think this is a bit of a "rug pull", so to speak. Not an intentional one by any means, I don't think the devs were planning all along to entrap a userbase by luring them in with the promise of FOSS and then trusting that apathy will keep them onboard once their intentions were revealed. But, well, that is the strategy that gets used by "the bad guys". Start with something great, garner an audience, then chip away at user freedoms bit by bit, enough that people never get enraged, just mildly angry before forgetting, and once they've forgotten, chip away again. We're seeing it play out with privacy laws, desktop/mobile operating systems, voter's rights, and far more.
Is Bear going from a permissive FOSS license to a slightly more restricted source-available one the same thing as Big Tech pushing mass surveillance? Absolutely not, it's nowhere even remotely close. I would still use Bear over an equivalent Google service in a hearbeat if I had to choose one or the other. But it's something where if I had to choose between one or the other (and of course, I don't have to in reality), I would be compromising something in either case. Again, it's an astronomical difference between the two. But as far as a "rigid, absolutist FOSS philosophy" goes, the zealots among us would have to say no to both. I'm not a Free Software fanatic, I'll connect to the wifi in other peoples' houses without inspecting their router, I'll watch Youtube videos occasionally. But I think that FOSS absolutism is something we should, at least, aspire toward when we can, and I think that in situations like this where a service that people use takes a step back from that ideal, they shouldn't simply let it happen.
I guess what I don't understand, and why I resonate more with the less forgiving views of this license change, is what does Bear gain by cutting off access to competing services? How do the "free-riding" services take anything away from Bear? I don't understand the motivation. The implication is there is something financial going on (he complains that the competing services are threatening his livelihood), but as you said in your other post, Bear is a free service, so what is the actual threat there? Is this whole move just out of spite?
From the outside this looks exactly like what ConalFisher describes--he chose the MIT license and claims to be a proponent of open source, but as soon as the 100% predictable outcome of choosing that license happened he got butthurt and did a 180. It's not the kind of move you'd expect to see from someone who is actually knowledgable about and invested in open source, and the reasons he gives don't really pass the smell test. It's just not a great look from any angle you view it from.
I think that what you are overlooking is that it is a mix of practical and personal concerns.
Practically speaking, having clones pop up can confuse users, dilute the brand and fragment the community he says is the most valuable part of bear. The livelihood here might not be about direct income from the blog. But the project is closely tied to his professional identity and company, something he mentioned in an earlier blog post.
But beyond that, there is a human element here, one based on emotion. When you pour years of effort into a passion project, seeing it copied with minimal changes and sold by others can just feel violating. Dismissing that very human reaction as someone being "butthurt" overlooks why people create things in the first place.
I do agree that Herman might place too much value in bad actors running clones of bearblog. At the same time I understand where he is coming from and considering the context I really think it shouldn't be so controversial as people make it out to be.
I didn't mean to imply that I see this as some kind of huge controversy--for example if he made it closed-source or chose a more restrictive license that forbade commercial use in the first place that would be perfectly reasonable. The aspect of this that looks hypocritical to me is that Bear's source code started under a permissive license, which would be a selling point to people who value FOSS as a philosophy and potentially enticed some of those people to sign up, but that license was clearly chosen without understanding the consequences or actually adhering to the principles it implied. It is a bit of a rug-pull to those specific (possibly hypothetical) users whose decision to sign up was influenced by the belief that the choice in license was a well-informed one--a fairly mild rug-pull, granted, but a rug-pull nonetheless.
Exactly. I flat out stop using any software that tries to garner support from the FOSS world by being open, and then suddenly get an attack of the greed and close shop. It's fundamentally wrong.
Want to develop closed source software and never release? That's fine. I think my editor of choice, Sublime Text is like that. No issues.
Write useful software that people end up relying on, then relicense it to their detriment? Eat rocks.
Every choice to use FOSS should be well informed to recognize that the contributor(s) can stop contributing at any time. This is no different. I don't see why the onus of being informed should solely fall on the person who is freely providing their time and efforts.
Why shouldn't the perspective of this be along the lines of the contributor stopped contributing to the project, and is now contributing to a different project? Yes, I realize it's the same technical project under a different license, but the license dictates how the contributor wants their contributions to be used and therefore should treated as equal to any other project where the contributor changes where they place their contributions.
I do think that means the users should take into account, just like they would an abandoned project, the long-term reliability of any other projects from that contributor and that would be part of an informed choice on their part whether they would use or engage with such projects. I believe this was an early concern of uBlock Origin to some extent because the creator of this abandoned his original project uBlock and left it in the hands of someone he didn't really know that well which also impacted all the users of that project by giving someone else access to their systems by way of being able to publish changes to the extension in undesirable ways. Of course its been a long time since that happened and those aren't generally seen as relevant concerns anymore (not that they were massive concerns at the time because the explanation given by the creator was seen as reasonable and understandable as well as showing greater awareness to that situation).
Is uBlock Origin not a worthy project simply because the guy who started it didn't make the smartest most informed decisions when he started with uBlock? People make mistakes and sometimes learn from those mistakes.
I agree with that, and I think I agree with everything else you said. I do not agree with the implication that users should just roll with the punches and have no right to get upset or voice their disagreement when licensing or ownership drama occurs. Users have a right to voice their opinion and be informed by the opinion of others. In fact I think pointing these things out and raising awareness (just like what's going on in this thread) is super important. I don't think anyone is claiming (or at least I am not trying to claim) that Bear is an "unworthy" platform as a result of the license change, or that Bear does not have the right to make the change. Just pointing out that it's kinda a dick move.
You are confusing Free Software and Open Source.
Free Software prioritizes user freedoms above all else. Open Source is a non-confrontational, pragmatic and business-focused movement that extols the benefits of an open development process from the businesses' point of view.
Here it is, straight from the horses' mouth. To wit:
In other words, Open Source being friendly to businesses isn't a second-order effect that fell out of moral obligation to its users. Instead, the point was to promote the use of an open development process to businesses, so they could take advantage of free labor, without the "confrontational" moral arguments concerning user freedom. And the sponsors of the OSI are certainly getting their money's worth.
In my opinion, Open Source licenses are ill-suited for any individual, community, or small business software project unless:
Unfortunately, I suspect most developers default to MIT out of habit, not thinking the project will go anywhere, or remembering a time where a copyleft or source-available license prevented them from using a particular piece of software, and only discover the downsides of Open Source after they've personally been bitten.
I have been conflating the two terms here; I figured it wasn't worth getting bogged down with semantics, but you are correct, I've been generally talking about Free Software rather than Open Source software. Though in retrospect it's probably a safe bet that people on the Tech subforum of Tildes in a thread about code licensing would be able to discern the two terms.
I only point it out because it's not a small distinction, it's a very fundamental differences in the baseline set of morals that underpin the two.
And if I'm being honest, I don't blame people for getting them conflated. The Free Software Foundation has been a horrendous steward of Free Software and Copyleft over the past few decades, and has essentially sat back and let Open Source eat its lunch after releasing a compromised version of the GPL that was at once too principled for some (Tivoization) and didn't go far enough in the parts that actually mattered (The network hole).
Maybe it's just phrasing, but this boggles me because open source is evidently highly compatible with a capitalist mindset. The proliferation of licenses like the one the author used initially has created a massive commons that can be nearly freely capitalized on by anyone, also in ways that are antithetical to the philosophy you describe above. I can attest that most of the proprietary, closed source, commercial software I've worked on was built on substantial piles of BSD/MIT licensed libraries.
In my opinion, free software as defined by GNU has a better claim to represent your philosophy in that it meaningfully incentivizes mutually beneficial development and the production of software that users can modify freely, by requiring authors to provide the source code of the modified versions they distribute to others. Especially GPLv3 seems like a commercial dead end, because the people who make computer appliances like Internet Of Shit, set top boxes, NAS etc. really, really don't agree with you on whether you should have any power over your computers, a position to which the MIT license is very agreeable.
I worded that sentence quite poorly, I'll admit. Here's a (hopefully) better-worded elaboration from a reply I made:
But this code doesn't run on your computer, it runs on someone else's computer. It's a web service.
What is often misunderstood in discussions about software licensing is that "open source" can mean a lot of different things, and it's up to the creator to define what it means for their specific project. Unless you pay for it, you are not entitled to their work. They can change the license every day if they want, and there is nothing wrong about that. You are not going to demand a cup of coffee every day from your neighbor just because they offered you one once. Stop demanding things from free software developers.
The only criticism I have is that they shouldn't have picked MIT in the first place. It is the license to choose if you want others to profit from your work without giving anything back.
Very true, the Bear developer is free to do whatever they want with the software running on their server. If I were to host my own instance of their FOSS source code, however, they wouldn't have any say on what I could do with it either. My point is that by picking the MIT license (which was almost certainly a mistake on the developer's part, one that they chose to not fix for too long) they allowed people to do whatever they wished with that source code. But now that people are doing whatever they want with it, namely modifying and hosting their own instances, the developer is changing things to make sure that can't happen anymore in the future.
That is, of course, well within their right; nobody can force them to run their own code in a certain way. But the vibe being given off by this whole event is one where the dev chose to publish their code under a permissive FOSS license (as you said, FOSS is a spectrum, but the MIT is a very lax license) without understanding the ramifications of doing so, and when faced with those ramifications they got defensive and decided to ensure that nobody else could copy them in the future. There's nothing wrong with that really, it just comes off a bit, I don't know, disingenuous?
Anyways, I've written like 2000 words in this comments section already, over a piece of software I don't even use, so I'll leave it there. But I do agree with the points you've made here, absolutely.
Ah yes. Pulling up the ladder always works well. I guess there weren't too many contributors to browbeat into allowing the change of license. How long before 'Cub Blog' releases on the last MIT licenced release and eats their lunch. Maybe they should ask redis? This sort of relicensing of existing projects is disgusting. Don't want your pet project used by people? Well okay, make a closed source one.
But don't make it open, build a community and then slam the door. That's just scummy.
There is honestly a bit more nuance to it than just that. Bear blog itself is a free service and while the license was open source already did not accept contributions for quite a while. Which is reflected in the fairly short contributor list. See also this note on the readme.
Basically what I am getting at is that this isn't some sort of big corporate entity trying to pull a rug pull.
There is no effective self-hosted user base of the software itself, as they already operated effectively on the "source available" model. Operated by an individual (not a big corporate entity) who made the source open for people to tinker with personally. Provides the service itself for free and is now finding other entities running with the code and charging people a lot more for it.
If you want to throw some criticism towards them, it is that they possibly should have done their homework better on what the MIT license permits people to do. But I honestly don't think it is fair to throw them in the same category as redis and the likes.
edit:
To put in some more context, this blog post on sustaining the platform is also worth reading.
I don't understand how this affects him though. It's not like he's losing revenue because people are deciding to pay for another service for some reason. Like yeah, I guess if lazy people are trying to make money off of something you built, that's pretty shitty, but how does it materially hurt you at all?
Does it have to have a material impact for it to be a valid reason? I'd say that if the point is reached where there is material damage several borders have already been crossed.
I suppose some of it also depends on what you consider to be of material impact. If you have spend a lot of time and energy into making something a reality that shitty experience can also directly impact your future motivation and progress on the thing overall.
While I can empathize with the sort of emotional response, and he can of course do what he wants, I am not sure the threat is actually that big of a deal. But there are some perspectives on how AI vibe coding is a challenge for the original spirit of FOSS projects. Another bear blogger responded to this.
The value Bear Blog provides isn't really with its tech, but with the community that is built around it. Someone being able to spin up a copy-cat product is not really something I see as a big threat to what herman has built with Bear Blog. It is like an empty instance of Facebook is pretty worthless in itself, as it won't attract users anyway.
I wouldn't be capable of having my own website so to me value is the tech and Herman himself. It is quite a privilege for a non-programmer to have a company founder as tech support. I try to not bother him too much but yeah, it's nice. The kind of content I put up is not relevant for Bear's community and I completely removed votes from my posts. So I am definitely there for the tech and the Hermann.
I am a happy customer of bearblog. I am in constant contact with the founder and maintainer because I am ignorant about programming. He treats me like I am an human which I appreciate. He also provides a discount for Brazil which I also appreciate. I fully support his decision to choose whatever license is required for him to be able to sustain himself financially.
As a bearblog user, Herman's post strikes me in an odd way.
I can understand how it might feel to see people take your open-source code and set up their own paid services, when you're running a service yourself. But why does this "hurt"? If you chose a freely open license to begin with and other people take your code and build their own products with it... that's fully in the spirit of the license you originally chose. Also wouldn't you be glad that more people are using your code and doing their own things with it? Sure, there's no requirement for them to contribute back, necessarily, or make any major modifications, and I get how that can feel like just being "copied"... but this whole response just seems off to me and against the entire spirit of the licensing they chose in the first place
I suppose it's all about perspective and I don't think making something open-source and then seeing other uses as a threat makes any sense. I guess the one thing I can agree with is if Herman's not open to a change in perspective, then yes, indeed, they absolutely chose the wrong license and yes, if they're interested in protecting their work at all costs commercially, then the "right" move is to change licensing, but they should have known this from the beginning. They certainly have the "right" or freedom to change the licensing, I'm not arguing that. I'm simply arguing that I think their perspective is off.
I get the whole thing with AI coding and all that, and sure there are people that would take existing code, use AI garbage to modify and make their own thing. As someone vehemently anti-AI, I can empathize. But seeing any competition (or alternative communities) to your own service/community as a threat / negative thing though is what I just don't vibe with... and not to mention, the cat's already out of the bag, and doing a switch after-the-fact instead of making better choices in the first place, kinda just makes this a mess, and leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I've already been considering changing hosts, and going with a more static-based site. I need more flexibility than the service offers at this point. Maybe it's time.
And bear is not an only-free-option service. Its base tier is free, but it has a paid tier also (which I pay for). So I think the potential of competition to his paid tier of bearblog from other services based on the code is likely playing into his perception of a threat.
(and I'm not even a zealous proponent of open-source that constantly preaches or always looks for open source (and although probably not enforceable, for certain things, I prefer custom licenses that disallow corporate use, etc.) but I think this is an unnecessarily negative view of the behavior of others when it comes to open-source code)- no one is stabbing you in the back by doing things with your source that your licensing freely allows them to do...
People seem to think that free-riding is an undesirable side effect of open source when actually, it's all about copying other people's homework. When we release software under an open source license, it's a gift to the world. The world includes some terrible people, but hopefully it works out in the end.
Maybe this seems like a bad deal? If so, it's perfectly fine to change your mind and use a different license from now on.
If the author wants to no longer make his project open source, that’s fine, in the end.
That being said, I do wonder if they’re overvaluing their own source code. To be honest, a microblogging service is something a developer can whip up in an afternoon. There’s probably sufficient material online that an LLM agent could write one completely independently. I don’t think there’s really all that much point gatekeeping it.
But that's kind of the issue isnt it? An llm is able to write one independently because its built off of repositories like bear blog...
In this case youre just moving the profit and community interaction from an individual to a massive, government meddling corporation. There is no qualm here with people building their own microblogging platforms, even using his source as inspiration or whatever. Its with bad actors who are now just rewarded by the system. Its an emotional, knee jerk reaction to the reality of foss or creative enterprise in general these days.
Exactly, that was also my first thought.
I think what made people choose Bearblog was the fact that it’s run by a human being and not a big corporation, its plan for longevity and the care that it’s being put in it. Those things couldn’t be simply copied.