Bear is now source-available (due to code theft and livelihood snatching) \ stacker news ~tech

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Bear is now source-available (due to code theft and livelihood snatching)herman.bearblog.dev/license/

247 sats \ 7 comments \ @jbschirtzinger 1 Sep tech

10 sats \ 6 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 1 Sep

Sigh. And now someone has to fork the last MIT licensed version to keep it free. Source available is bullshit and means closed source. Free and Open source means you don’t and should not care what people can do with your code. Worrying about what other companies do with code you released to the commons, including commercial exploitation, will send you insane. See Wordpress for a modern example.

“If the only library is closed source, then there's a project to make an open source one.

If the only library is GPL, then there's a project to make a non-GPL one.

If the best library is MIT, Boost, new-BSD or public domain, then we can stop re-writing it.”, Satoshi Nakamoto, 2010

11 sats \ 1 reply \ @nerd2ninja 1 Sep

I disagree with Satoshi Nakamoto. "We" aren't working on the bear code base. 15 people had contributed. 15 people put in the effort. Those 15 people should decide how their work gets to be treated.

I of course believe they should have went with AGPL, because at least they could have benefited from their competitors code contributions that way, and then you could say "they" (but still not "we") were working on the same library together.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 2 Sep

You disagree philosophically, and that’s ok. Everyone deserves to get paid for their work. I will remark however that marginal cost of a line of code has dropped considerably in the last year…

I do think that SN hints at a general core idea that software trends towards more permissive or free licenses over time.

AGPL from the beginning is noble, but ultimately limits reach. Delegation to the commons of “deciding how their work gets treated” that permissive licenses grant is exactly how software products get popular. Changing the rules when you get successful (competitors reselling your product and you not getting a cut) is of course an option, but so is taking the last known free and open version and building something new from it.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 1 Sep

And now someone has to fork the last MIT licensed version

Here's the commit: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/commit/3a5d9d4971987222128a325d857eb9f9fd8d37c0

% git log --oneline
998e872 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) update: license copy
89c3f34 update: copyleft license
34f1cb5 update: license
00d6ac8 update: added commons clause to license
3a5d9d4 (tag: LAST_MIT_COMMIT) update: fixed blog path title
ca4e872 update: staff dashboard filter by week and month
ccf3ebf update: count by week
ea1a384 update: move style above script
07abbe0 hotfix: broken discovery rss feed

archived. Can publish copy until 3a5d9d4

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @bitcal 1 Sep

Any chance you have a link to the source of this quote? I’d love to add it to my open source database.

203 sats \ 1 reply \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 2 Sep

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=989.msg12494#msg12494

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcal 2 Sep

Thank you!