Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
450 points by stephenheron 7d ago 620 comments
Ask HN: Did Developers Undermine Their Own Profession?
8 points by rayanboulares 16h ago 16 comments
Bear is now source-available
292 neoromantique 260 9/1/2025, 1:17:56 PM herman.bearblog.dev ↗
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.
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
Not wanting to further widen the schism but wasn't that the free software people rather than the open source people? cf [0], particularly the "not as strict" part.
> In the late 1990's Eric Raymond and others developed the term "open source" as a more business friendly term than "free software", with a more inclusive meaning where licenses that were not as strict about the passing on of modifications would also quality for the term.
[0] https://www.freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Eric_...
Open Source provides the same “4 freedoms” as Free Software so most Open Source licenses qualify as Free Software as well.
If the goal is developer collaboration, permissive licenses are often the best choice. If you want maximum user entitlement, copyleft licenses limit developer freedom in exchange for a guarantee that future code will also be released as free software.
Cloud hosting was a challenge that did not exist when either philosophy first emerged.
With hosting, you are able to become the preferred source for software without adding much value to the code itself. This is what the author is complaining about.
The AGPL tries to address this in the GPL family but I don’t think it quite gets there. For permissive licenses, we see these “no hosting” exceptions.
If you read the early writings from the Free Software Foundation, they do not care if devs can make a living. The goal is user freedom. I think it is this philosophy that objects to the hosting exceptions.
Perhaps a better solution will be found in the future.
Expanding on this, the Free Software movement always focused on freedom for users - which, in a world where copyright applies to computer programs, ultimately leads to the licenses you listed to repurpose it.
The Open Source movement usually tries to advocate for open-source as the best development model. As in, writing it in the open and contributing with other people will result in objectively better software in the long term. Others treated it (when the term was coined) as a marketing term for Free Software, making it more palatable to businesses whose people running it don't want to talk about ethics too much.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
s/open source/free software/
None of those licenses prevent Amazon-style freeloading though.
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.
I'm not actually sure what a better way to square the circle of not making the large entities that have developed a weird patronage relationship with open source projects run away while also avoiding the kinds of problem that the GPLv3 and AGPL are hoping to deal with, would be. Limiting the virality scope might be beneficial there, but I'm not sure how you would word that in a way that's not gameable.
It feels like we've wound up in a weird position where because so many GPLv2 projects moved to GPLv3, companies were startled into paying attention to the risks involved in a new license with open questions about how it would shake out in actual courts, as well as being jolted to the very real possibility it could happen again, and took the path of risk reduction by moving toward platforms where that couldn't happen.
You might compare it to everyone pointing to Solaris's source closing as a reason to not trust Oracle about MySQL's license remaining GPLv2. (As it turned out, so far, they haven't changed the license, but there was certainly a lot of fearmongering about that at the time.)
So I think I agree that it's not so much a coordinated effort to steer anything as the direct effects of companies avoiding funding that space, as well as the knock-on effect that anyone whose goals involve large companies using their product and leveraging that avoids picking a license that precludes that in turn.
Doubly so when they relicense outside contributors' work with a closed source license because those contributors signed a CLA.
And lets be real here: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/graphs/contributo...
Looking at the details of that, the only two (small) substantial code changes from other people are "User can delete their own account" from 2020, and "Use cloudflare online dns api to perform domain check" from 2021.
I have no horse in the race, just think that maybe this project is not a good measure of contributions.
That's why I said "most people" (of which I think HN commenters are not a representative sample) rather than "nobody" :)
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?
Unless you’re entering into a contract with the project maintainer (which you’re not, if you’re just downloading or using it) then such a commitment means nothing.
Applying an open source license to your work means you’ve licensed other people to use it under those terms.
You can make all the commitments you want in the license, but it doesn’t actually commit you to keeping all future work open source as well under the law.
So you could write this license and make the commitment, but if you changed your mind later and decided not to open source future commits to the project that you made then nobody could stop you. Not unless you had entered into a contractual agreement with them and exchanged some consideration (money).
(What I'm given to understand does work is using a copyleft license and taking code from multiple parties without a CLA, because then relicensing requires all the copyright owners to agree, which for a large enough project is impractical.)
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?
If I’ve learned anything from reading HN comments, it’s that “open source” means different things to different people, including those who believe themselves to have specific knowledge of the history of the topic.
There are half a dozen different claims about the original meaning of “open source” in this comment section alone. They’re coming from people citing history and notable figures from open source past.
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.
No comments yet
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.
Importantly - any competitor can grab it and modify it to make it easier for them to run at scale and keep those changes closed-source.
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.
I'm not sure why someone who is spending their limited free time building software to give away for free would want Amazon as a downstream consumer
Do you enjoy spending your nights and weekends dealing with CVE reports, while a high-6-figure BigTech engineer nags you that they need it fixed?
Are you kidding? This is the dream scenario for many open source projects: Getting adopted by a major company is a claim to fame like none other.
> Do you enjoy spending your nights and weekends dealing with CVE reports, while a high-6-figure BigTech engineer nags you that they need it fixed?
Then don’t? You don’t have to do anything. It’s fine to ignore it you want.
Practically speaking, Amazon engineers aren’t going to sit around and hope the maintainer fixes the thing that unblocks them. If they actually need it, they’ll fix it. They might fork it. They might try to recruit the person.
But nothing obligates you to do anything. This hand-wringing about the idea that someone might find the project useful enough to identify issues and report them is rather ridiculous. Just ignore it if that’s prerogative.
It is an annoying problem to have, but if your goal is to be able to support yourself by working on your open source project full time (not saying this has to be or should be everyone’s goal), then having big tech engineers nagging you is probably a good problem to have.
It’s a huge badge of honor and a rare accomplishment. You’re thinking too directly if you can’t imagine how having your OSS project adopted by Big Tech isn’t a career boost.
Subjective. Sure if you are talking about percent of market share, but it's a huge market, you don't need to capture even 1% of users to have a viable business.
The vast majority of the GNU ecosystem is GPL. Bash, git, Apache, Gimp, Blender, Libreoffice.
There are also a lot of projects that are dual licensed, allowing commercial software to be charged a fee and non-commercial software to use for free with GPL.
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.
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.
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.
You might say, "well wouldn't that be most of what people might want to do with it?" And you might be right, but so what? No one is entitled to build their business on the back of someone else's work, not without their permission anyway.
That certainly makes software like this no longer Free Software. But I'm not religious about it, and maybe that's ok sometimes.
(It also runs afoul of several parts of the OSI Open Source Definition, but maybe that's ok too.)
From the license at <https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/998e87263248...>:
"You may not provide the Software as a hosted or managed service that offers users access to substantial features or functionality"
Given that the exclusive purpose of the Software in question is to implement a managed service for its users' hosting needs, I'm having trouble understanding how anyone could take the position that this is "mostly in the spirit of FOSS".
The license might as well say, "You just can't use this."
No comments yet
I don't see how, there is nothing in the spirit of FOSS by doing that.
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).
(AGPL, however, was nearly impossible to get permission to use)
Of course a company must forbid copy/paste of GPL code, because that would GPL the codebase and that's hardly what they want. But one should ask the Legal office (and/or other offices) about adding any MIT, BSD or proprietary library: credit must be given (how?), licenses must be available and compatible with the way the software is distributed. There are so many licenses out there, everything should be vetted.
Of course everything should be vetted, but lawyers have canned advice about common licenses they see often — GPL, MIT, etc.
[1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
Any examples when AGPL was used successfully by competitors? Typically every company prohibits using this licence.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Also, MIT license in particular is much shorter and easier to understand for a non-lawyer, than most other software licenses.
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.
They couldn't do anything with it (alter or even build iirc), but they could look at it.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1336859/microsoft-open...
Ha. How times have changed:
> But governments won’t get the ability to alter source code. “This isn’t about developing or supporting customized versions of Windows,” Mundie said. The GSP and other source-code access programs are about “helping build comfort and trust with our key customers on how Windows is deployed, how security is running and how other software is running on top of Windows,” he said.
> Russia’s Federal Agency for Governmental Communication and Information has signed a GSP agreement with Microsoft, and the company says it’s in discussions with about 20 other governments.
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.
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.
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.
(I have no objections against the “source available” though - it’s a pretty unambiguous and useful term, that isolates one specific property.)
it's not copyleft, it's a version of freeware license
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
The history of technology and markets show this just isn’t true on any significant timescale.
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.
That's because then it isn't. Sorry, but you can't just take terms with an accepted meaning and decide they mean something else, without any conversation or consensus from there people using that term.
The OSI has a specific definition of what "open source" means[0]. Restricting what users of the software can do in this way is in direct opposition to parts of that definition, so no, if you do that, then it is no longer open source.
I'm not saying you aren't entitled to set up your licensing that way. I think it's disgusting when the likes of Amazon decide to take someone's hard work and use their massive oligopolist position to trivially outcompete anything the original author might try to do to make some money.
But that doesn't mean it's open source. I think people need to stop being so afraid to call their software something else. They seem to be really attached to the idea of being an "open source developer", and don't want to drop that moniker even after changing their licensing away from open source.
People also need to stop licensing their software under true OSS licenses, building a community of regular, significant contributors around it, and then changing their licensing (which they can do because they've [IMO shadily] required contributors to reassign copyright). That's a huge bait-and-switch, and people are right to be upset when that happens.
In the case of Bearblog, it seems like the author is really the only significant contributor, so I think what he's doing is totally fine, for the record. Frankly I think he did this the right way: his announcement email is entirely reasonable and sympathetic, and he doesn't try to breathlessly claim that his software is still open source.
[0] https://opensource.org/osd [1]
[1] While I don't love how the OSI folks basically just decided they own the term "open source" and that they get to define it, I think they've been pretty good stewards over time, and having clear-cut definitions of things is a good thing.
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.
> This is a morbid topic for me to write about: what happens to Bear if something happens to me? I've got that covered too. There's a detailed succession plan in place, including:
Full documentation of all systems and processes Multiple trusted developers with access to the codebase Clear instructions for maintaining the platform So if I were to be incapacitated in any way, the platform will live on.
> Its portfolio includes Bear, the Apple Design Award winner notes app, …
> Bear, the Apple Design Award winner notes app
Which you could have known by spending five seconds on https://lambdalpha.com, or actually reading your own link which calls Bear an "Apple Design Award winner notes app", which doesn't really sound like the Bear blog.
Stop spreading rampant misinformation.
It also aligns quite well with Bear's manifesto [3]. Even if Bear PTY LTD ceases to exist, Bear won't. This can be codified under DOSP.
Disclaimer: I'm involved with fair source and helped write the FCL.
[0]: https://fair.io
[1]: https://opensource.org/dosp
[2]: https://fcl.dev
[3]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/
Is it correct to assume that software than eventually becomes open under something like Apache or MIT is fair source? Or is there more subtlety to it?
The concrete definition we came up with and published:
> Fair Source is an alternative to closed source, allowing you to safely share access to your core products. Fair Source Software (FSS):
> - is publicly available to read;
> - allows use, modification, and redistribution with minimal restrictions to protect the producer’s business model; and
> - undergoes delayed Open Source publication (DOSP).
Your options are: MIT / BSD, GPL, LGPL, AGPL. All others are unnecessary and create needless incompatibility.
Authors gave the right to change license to a proprietary one. Users being surprised by this are as equally naive as developers who think you can make money writing Open Source.
However, I still believe AGPL is a better alternative in most cases and functionally prevents large enterprises from touching your code due to typical internal policies.
This is a grievance against the spirit of open source.
Freedom 0 the freedom to use the work
Freedom 1 the freedom to study the work
Freedom 2 the freedom to copy and share the work with others
Freedom 3 the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative works
If Amazon tomorrow turns around and open sources everything that is a derivative work of the code they ever used, I would be more than happy, even proud if they used my software. Today any company which doesn’t deny their users the core software freedoms is already free to do so.
This is not a “hack” to be maliciously compliant OSS; this is the spirit of open source.
Why do you think the GPL has the virality clause in the first place?
Edit: a perhaps reductive, but hopefully instructive summary: MIT/BSD guarantee freedoms of the software developers, GPL guarantees freedoms of the software users.
You are free to choose which you prefer, but they're quite explicit choices, and the AGPL is absolutely squarely in the spirit of the GPL.
(Now if you had said you take issue with the tivoization clause, on the other hand... :) :))
believe it or not this is not actually true! the corporations who disallow agpl do so because their lawyers (correctly) tell them that agpl-licensed software has not been adequately tested in relevant courts of law, and that by including agpl-licensed software they are opening themselves up to unknown/unbounded legal liability/risk!
"the spirit of open source" has nothing to do with anything!
the more you know
Don’t like the agpl wording, but agree with the spirit? Ok, you have the lawyers, write a better agpl that abides by the same spirit and which you trust.
But: nothing. And waiting won’t change that. It may be also true, but it’s just excuse at this point. They’re not chomping at the bit to introduce networked virality of software freedom into their platforms.
[0]: https://keygen.sh/blog/weaponized-open-source/
[1]: https://keygen.sh/blog/whither-open-source/
You should be vocal against CLAs, not the AGPL. CLAs with any license is a risk of seeing the code closed up.
AGPL allows competition. Any free software license does. It's rule 0 of free software.
> it's chosen to to be a non-compete.
Well, too bad for them, because I can still fork this AGPL software and compete. So what's the issue?
The issue would be for contributors contributing for to this code under CLA seeing their contributions closed up. If that's not your thing, don't contribute to software under such CLA. I avoid it myself.
No legal department will ever allow it due to the FUD. That's the whole fucking point.
The FSF have never cared even slightly about corporations being happy. Who cares if Google can't enrich themselves further? The point is to protect the users who are free to fork / host the software themselves.
I don't mind them not using my code. They are doing themselves here.
They have the human power to rebuild it anyway and I actually believe it should cost them.
it's actually them who are spreading the FUD, because they don't like the AGPL.
Meanwhile, my goal of providing software freedom to my users is fulfilled.
If the OSI came out and made a statement on the ambiguities in the AGPL, and cleared the FUD in such a way that all companies agreed and could reference it, I'd wager that the AGPL would over time become much, much less popular for commercial open source. But I'd wager that they won't do that, because they win when COSS wins.
But if they did, we'd likely even see a move towards non-OSS licenses, ones that are clear as to their intent and rules -- rather than relying on ambiguity -- because there would no longer be an OSI-approved license that businesses could use to have their cake and eat it too.
Very few COSS business/startup/w/e right now are choosing AGPL for altruistic reasons. This thread and every other COSS licensing thread here are evidence of that.
Few of them care about software freedoms, or know why they chose the AGPL. They have a playbook that says AGPL lets them take advantage of the open source distribution flywheel, while largely protecting them from the risks associated with commercial open source, i.e. competition. They choose AGPL for this, not because it's the best license for users.
I honestly don't get how people don't see the deception under the AGPL right now.
Let's say I don't care about the intent of people choosing the AGPL (I do, I wish people did stuff for altruistic reasons, but the economical system in which we live makes it so we can't rely on this).
You say people are choosing the AGPL because they think it lets them do effectively source-available while benefiting from open source washing. Fine. I don't like this. But the effect of this for me is that we actually get actual free software.
What's so bad with this?
I've reread your second text and didn't find what's actually bad with the AGPL.
Now, I wish all the FUD around AGPL was cleared; the FUD is what's bad, but I don't wan't to wait for this to happen before picking the AGPL for my software.
It's lying. It's an open source project and a business model built on deceit. I guess I care about clear rules, clear intentions, and I care about integrity above all. The AGPL is ambiguity; unclear rules, veiled intentions. And these same people will relicense without a thought, too. I think we should care about these things, otherwise we repeat history over and over again.
I don't see how it can do this. The AGPL is a license text. It states what people can do with the licensed code. What is lying in this text?
> I guess I care about clear rules, clear intentions, and I care about integrity
Me too
> The AGPL is ambiguity; unclear rules, veiled intentions
That's where I don't agree: The rules are written in the license text and I see no ambiguity there. Where is the ambiguity in the AGPL text? What is not clear about it? What granted rights are we not sure about?
> veiled intentions
The original intent of the AGPL authors (the FSF) was clear and simple to me: ensure the end user's freedom. It was GPL, but address the SaaS situation where someone can modify networked GPL software, make users use it from the network, without having to redistribute the modification since the program runs remotely and not on the user's machine. And that intent is perfectly align with what I want for my code.
Sure, people with bad intents will use the AGPL, and so what?
People kill with knives, but I'll definitely keep cooking with mine. The AGPL is a tool. It doesn't, by itself, has intents, especially veiled intents.
I'm not going to stop using the AGPL because someone wants to use it to trap users.
This is all abstract, I'd appreciate concrete examples where:
- people have done that, without a CLA (because yeah, I'm convinced AGPL+CLA can be bad).
- the AGPL doesn't work well for someone using it with the original intent in which the AGPL was written.
The example comes straight from the mouth of a COSS founder.
The agpl is ambiguous because users may choose not to fully use the freedom they were given? Sorry but this is bullshit. I'm glad I haven't started using this stuff yet (for other reasons). I'm sure I wouldn't notice such issues in topics I'm not at ease with and I can see how easy one can be seduced by this stuff.
Now, I'm convinced AGPL can be misused. What's more, I'm certainly quite happy that a side effect of the AGPL is that Google won't touch it, to mirror the comment you point to (whose author is wrong by the way, the intent behind the AGPL was not to exclude big tech, but to promote/protect user software freedom). All the fud around the AGPL actually comes from companies like Google, so respectfully fuck them all. Nobody could possibly have weaponised the AGPL against them had they not started spreading all the fud in the first place.
But even considering that picking the AGPL to scare big tech away is bad and weaponizes it (which I can hear, and let's assume), I believe you are wrong that nobody chooses the AGPL for the user freedom genuinely. There are a lot of examples of software under AGPL in good faith seemingly to me. Examples: Nextcloud, Joplin, CryptPad, Overleaf, Passbolt, Univention...
I doubt any of these commercial projects from friendly (?) companies choose the AGPL to fuck the world. I don't know the numbers, maybe it's a minority. You may not have numbers as well. Are you against the AGPL when used in good faith? If so, what to you suggest as an alternative?
I'm with you with the wish people were altruistic. But the system we live in doesn't exactly help being altruistic. Not being altruistic is certainly not a trait of people using AGPL, it's virtually everyone in a commercial setting (although some of us try to do their best to be good humans and virtuous). If anything, the AGPL was born from a ideal and that was certainly driven by something like altruism. All this blame towards the AGPL because people are out there to make money really feels weird to me.
Anyway, I don't think we'll reach an agreement here and that's OK. Thanks for the discussion, despite the strong disagreement it is/was stimulating.
I now understand where you’re coming from but I am not sold on your prediction that the agpl would crater if Google started complying with it. It would mean that Google open sources everything which is derivative work. That sounds like it would buy a lot of good will amongst precisely those people who are mad about how Amazon screwed redis (to put it bluntly).
Seems like the "COSS" grifters are the problem, not the AGPL or the average person who chooses AGPL.
Save for The Church of Emacs and St. IGNUcius (obvious jokes), FSF is a political and social activism organization - not a religious one. They have foundational principles and manifestos, sure, but those aren't religious dogmas, but rather the views/desires how the society should work.
Labeling FSF as religious implies that it's a cult and thus there's no talking reason to them. But they're no more religious than any other civil rights movement - the beliefs about software freedoms are no different than beliefs in any other social rights.
The whole piece is about CLAs, the AGPL has absolutely nothing to do with signing over your copyrights. See Canonical for the same behaviour without the AGPL, the AGPL just requires that you allow your users to also see the code they are using, even if it is accessed over a network.
> Many, like Google, have flat out banned the AGPL.
Yeah, but that's because Google hates sharing what they have built on the shoulders of giants.
People are welcome to use and host AGPLed software under its own FOSS terms. If people don't want to do that, and want to pay for alternative terms, that is also a sign that the license is effective. There's no point in restricting things people don't want to do. The GPL restricts something people want to do: make proprietary software. The AGPL restricts something people want to do: host software without distributing the source at all.
Why does this keep happening? Why are so may developers blind to this obvious outcome?
Especially when your project is new it's also not often clear that this project will become something more serious later where you have to worry about such things as people cloning your project.
I think MPL 2.0 is the ideal kind of copyleft, because of its scope being very clear.
> When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program?
> It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins. If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.
JSON data sent over the wire, particularly data with nested arrays and maps, and especially a bidirectional communication protocol, can reasonably count as "intimate communication" with "complex data structures" shipped "back and forth".
This is nonbinding guidance, but it is from the FSF, and it is legally untested afaik (not a lawyer). There's sufficient legal risk here that I'd be wary of using rich communication protocols with GPL programs, particularly if there isn't an explicit exception for that protocol.
No, shared memory is addressed later within the same answer.
> Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking.
The first part of the answer clearly includes programs sending each other "complex data structures", including nested JSON data, over pipes.
I would love to see this reversed and moved to AGPL instead.
Obviously the goal of Open Source licenses does not include making money. You might, or might not, but it's not a priority.
Equally your goal may be to only support Open Source projects. That's fine. For you removing support for this project makes sense.
Once a project reaches the stage of needing to create an income stream, Open Source licenses are no longer appropriate.
Yes, some developers are naive in thinking Open Source licenses protect their income stream. Yes some users are naive in thinking that projects will remain Open Source forever.
Source-available, or Shipped-with-source of whatever you want to call it is a proprietary license which is just fine. It's not Open Source, nor does it need to be.
IANAL, but does the above limitation prevent users from hosting bear for their own (or your company’s own) needs?
If so, doesn’t that defeat the whole reason why it’s MIT licensed.
https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/master/LICEN...
People and companies cannot host it and offer it as a service to other people or companies.
https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license/faq
Again, IANAL, but I can see why a company might be cautious about using Bear as a self-hosted blog engine, since companies technically have “users.”
For comparison, the Elastic License v2 - which this license is apparently modeled on - explicitly restricts use by "third parties":
> "You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service"
----
The Bear license doesn’t include similar language, which could create uncertainty.
It might help to explicitly clarify that self-hosting for one’s own use is allowed, or to add “third party” wording to the limitations.
I only raise this because (a) licensing is tricky, and (b) if this feedback helps the author clarify their intended license terms, that’s a win for everyone.
https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license
>Limitations: You may not provide the Software as a hosted or managed service that offers users access to substantial features or functionality.
Where on the spectrum sits an average cookie-cutter VPS provider that comes with an OS package manager that installs the program? Does the VPS provider have to screen the package manager? Does that change if they build a wiki with "1-click-install" that just sends an ssh command to install?
Is this just a requirement to have some theater where an "unaffiliated" third party has to provide the set-up scripts? Or just a rule you can't mention the option during the sales pipeline?
Crucially, I think what is banned to offer accounts. Offering turnkey-hosting is probably banned in spirit, but the person offering the turnkey-hosting is not in violation, rather the person booking the turnkey hosting and offering the accounts on the instance to third parties is in violation.
I think the wording is originally against somebody like Amazon hosting e.g. database instances for other people to use, and then giving you an account in that database. It's still OK to rent a VM from them and use the package manager to install it.
In any way, it is really confusing, in a way a license should not be. And I don't really understand why someone builds a blog platform, which is not monetized, open sources it, but doesn't want other people to host it. If I open source my stuff, I want people to use it. If I want to share the code but don't want people to use it I'd just put it somewhere it with no license at all (all rights reserved).
He seems to claim 3rd parties are offering bearblog commercially without modifications (or with useless modifications, like just a changed name).
Even better when a project starts with this model so it doesn't feel like a rug pull or doesn't get messy with forks overshadowing the original product. But I don't feel like Bear had the kind of scale to face this type of reaction.
I use mataroa.blog periodically which is in the same nice and I wish the Bear maintainers fulfillment with their project.
Now, no LLM is currently anywhere near doing that for ElasticSearch.
But for a project with 4845 lines of Python code? (as per tokei)
Definitely doable, with a bit of handholding and manual fixing.
Would that be a derivative work? Maybe, but that would be a hard legal battle.
Wouldn't you do this just against the/an API documentation? Interesting thought.
You could probably feed all of ElasticSearch into an LLM and ask it to "reimplement it" successfully. But why would you even bother? There's already an existing open-source alternative called OpenSearch [1].
[1]: https://github.com/opensearch-project/opensearch
Bear is still here https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear and open source
So you can get a self-hosted site that looks and acts like a Bear Blog, but run it yourself with a free software SSG.
You know something's broken when Microsoft gets to claim to be the biggest backer of open source.
Meanwhile they'll break your back and steal all your trust and credibility if they can
They can say whatever they want. They're just lying. If you spend even a little bit of time looking into it you'll find it's just a marketing strategy.
I'm not claiming Microsoft is a good actor (and they certainly produce a whole lot of derpy trash along the way), but the argument itself is not particular sound.
I've been curious about how LLMs would impact open source, I have some theories and this is not the only one.
I don't think it would exactly be "create a fork of this repo", but if a developer invests significant time and effort solving hard problems where the solutions are implemented in the released source, once an LLM model is trained on it, then someone else could quickly and easily have the LLM generate a new program that implements the novel solutions. Whether this is a problem or not may depend on the motivations of the developer, but this potential for IP laundering may very well begin influencing the licenses and methods of distribution that people choose.
(Of course, I suppose at some point AI will be able to analyze and learn from binary executables or obfuscated source...)
This way someone could create a competing service but they would have to write the entire service layer themselves and a single user would be able to self host the core part.
Also curious what they think about the thiefs not caring about the license and copy pasting it anyway. I don’t think the kind of person that copies your code and tries to sell it would really care about the license
I'd like to comment further on the permissive license point:
> When I started building Bear I made the code available under an MIT license. I didn't give it much thought at the time
I suspect many people choosing permissive licenses do it in the same spirit. They don't give much thoughts about the license, they just want to share the code with others (which is very nice!), and there was a push some years ago to make permissive licenses the default in many ecosystems (this is not innocent, by the way).
For me, the first lesson from this blog post is: think hard about what you want to really allow.
Given what the author says later:
> It hurts to see something you've worked so hard on for so long get copied and distributed with only a few hours of modification
The permissive license was obviously a bad choice. Not blaming, of course, hindsight is 20/20.
Pick permissive licenses if you are okay to work for free for other entities, and if you are cool with the potential asymmetry of them not sharing their improvements.
I'll preach for my church: when you release something, please consider a strong copyleft license. If it's SaaS, consider AGPL. It still allows people to provide services with your work, but if they need to improve your code, they are required to redistribute the improvements to their users. I don't see many reasons, in most cases, to allow people to get your code and not do the same as you: provide the code to their users; that's unfair to both their users and yourself (a notable exception is if you want to push/promote a format or a standard - then you want to push adoption at "all" costs).
Most of the times, this means you can get these improvements back. By sharing free software under AGPL, it is still possible that you'll work for free for someone else. But at least, you'll be competing on more equal footing. They'll actually need to work to be better than you.
In both cases, your advantage over them is your expertise in your own stuff.
A side effect of the AGPL is that big corps are afraid of it, so you will likely not get competition from them (even though AGPL allows them to do so).
Note that while the original change was an additional clause to the MIT license, it was quickly changed to something completely different.[0] Since it no longer permits sublicensing and restricts "remov[ing] or obscur[ing] any licensing, copyright, or other notices in the Software," I believe it's closer to GPL now?
[0]: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/commit/89c3f346ef...
The problem of attempting to enumerate the jerks does seem pretty... insurmountable... to me though.
BTW, if the jerk list is tied to the license, if the project had external contributors, they all need to agree to add or remove someone from the list, like any license change…
Not if you base this off a license like MIT that allows sublicensing under more restrictive terms (not a lawyer, not legal advice)
We should probably remind people that licensing is an agreement between them and the other party deciding what can and can't be done. Make sure you've considered things like profit, competitors, source redistribution, etc ahead of time. Then, pick the license that suits your goals best. For many, that's source-available licenses instead of open source.
"Bear Blog has been built as a platform and not as an individual blog generator. It is more like Substack than Hugo. Due to this it isn't possible to individually self-host a Bear Blog."
0. https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/master/requi...
If you want your projects license agreement to be withheld in future projects there is a license for that. Its called copyleft
Maybe it was a mistake on their part to make it initially open source or it is bad that there are people looking to steal other people’s work
If this doesn't suit you (as in, if this is a project you can't run, let alone maintain yourself), then you should consider paying someone (preferably the authors) to do so. I know this is novel to many people here who are used to exploiting the free labour of open-source maintainers, but it's been a decider in tech choices I make lately.
'Can I/anyone else at the company debug an issue and create a bugfix for this cool new open-source tech I want to introduce?' If no, then we are not qualified to run it without external help.
https://pico.sh includes a suite of other services (some paid) but the business model doesn’t depend on prose in particular.
So the original project wants to restrict user freedoms, i.e. they _do not_ want the project to be open source; it's a legit choice, even if I personally prefer free software.
and turns out once you upvote, you can't downvote?
Well, I love minimalist site providers Its license is AGPL which still technically falls under Open source as to what "OSI?" says.
Source available just have a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe my critique of them isn't based on good intentions but I feel like I am getting really restricted as a user by source available licenses. I understand the pain of developers trying to make money. I just think that AGPL is a better use case and even elastic search went back to agpl and a lot of these source available things are going to agpl
I am sure that big tech might be able to bypass agpl itself somehow and that's why there were things like sspl but I still think that agpl is one of the most rock solid copy left licenses.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-source-and-capita...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-source-anti-patte...
No, you don't believe in open source, hypocrite.
Open source means anyone can use it, even for commercial purposes, and you knew this from day zero.
Honestly, no sympathy for these people, as this happens over and over again, they actually exploit the very few good intended OSS people. They portray their project as open source initially, to gather sympathy and free work from others, then when they see the $$$ they flip the switch to non-OSS and rub their hands.
Then in the last couple weeks or so[1] it seems they saw a bit of a spike, and immediately pulled up the ladder.
They even criticised this sort of behaviour in their manifesto:
>We've seen our fair share of open-source projects become sour (see the recent Wordpress drama) or abandoned entirely. We've seen OpenAI become ClosedAI. There's a common thread here. Trust isn't just a legal structure, but a social contract.
I am actually totally in favor of source available licenses, but in this case it seems counter to all the boasts the developer has made about their platform.[2]
[0]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/ [1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... [2]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-foreve...
Your evidence is solid, after all, it was the same guy who wrote that just a few months ago.
That post might be gone soon, "smaht" people are inclined to rewrite history to fit their current mood.
If open source purists can't accept that, they'll find their cause gradually shrinking into nothing.
You can always pull the rug under someone and get away with it, no consequences and even no remorse. You may even think of yourself as being the "smaht" one on that dynamic.
But some of us were cut from a different cloth and we can see the kind of person you are @archagon, from miles away.
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IMO - you are charging money for your app which makes you a business. When you don't listen to the market you forfeit any right to complain when you get your lunch money stolen. Sounds hard but most lessons in business are expensive!