> the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd

The original stance of the open source crowd was more along the lines of the GPL -> GPLv3 -> AGPL, which expressly prevents this kind of thing.

The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals

Most people have no problem with non-open source software. The gnashing of teeth comes in when projects like Terraform become successful specifically because they're open source, and then the maintainer changes to a closed source license that would have prevented the project from being successful in the first place.

Doubly so when they relicense outside contributors' work with a closed source license because those contributors signed a CLA.

Unfortunately, AWS has invented and legitimized this entirely new class of leeching off of open source work, where they capture the entire economic value of a project by owning the hosting infrastructure; contributing nothing back and forking when the original authors protest. OSS stewards should correct this - in my view disallow cloud vendors beyond a certain size to freeload.

> As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source, and they'll get very upset at you if you claim it is.

If you aren't interested in open source, that's your option, but open source has had a clear meaning for decades. You can use/write your software and people that believe in open source can use/write open source. What's the problem?

People can license their software however they want, but it is worth reflecting on why almost all open source authors go with a permissive license like MIT: because it is basically a "buyer's market." When choosing a database, distributed queue, blogging platform, or whatever, companies usually have a choice of at least several high quality open source options.

If one of those options places restrictions on the users, then those users are probably going to choose one of the other options.

As a result, licensing your project GPL or the like usually means relegating it to obscurity. There are very notable exceptions, including Linux and WordPress, but they are outliers. It's hard to monetize an MIT project, but it is even harder to monetize a project without users.

Whether this is "good" or "bad" is a separate debate (err, usually flame war), but I think many people gloss over that this is a coordination problem and that everyone is acting rationally. For better or worse, software does not seem to be scarce.

> As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source

Isn't this what the AGPL is for? That's an OSI approved "open source" license that places restrictions on people making the software accessible as a network service.

> As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't...

Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the software for any purpose. You can't deny users this freedom "for their own good", or to spite big corporations, and still be free software.

Subtler issues of power and dependency won't be resolved through licensing alone, and certainly not by compromising on basic software freedom for users.

Free software ought to not be discriminatory and arbitrarily exclude users. Full stop. Anyone means anyone.

Now, we can agree and talk about unfortunate consequences and possible mitigations.

The AGPL is one possible mitigation: Big corps are usually afraid of it. But they do themselves: the AGPL doesn't forbid them to use the thing.

I guess I'm in that crowd, and well, I definitely recognise that! Open source is an important term, and I don't want to see it degraded. I think I'd find it annoying if this blog post was trying to claim Bear was still free software, or open source.

That doesn't mean I think everything has to be open source. Bear is a blogging platform trying to make money and it seems fine to me for it not to be open source.

> What Herman is doing is a service to us all, and we should find a term (better than 'source-available', which is cold and doesn't capture community projects accurately) that people can promote themselves under without much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

People are cold to source-available projects because of their experience of source-available projects. If you want to benefit from the warm reputation that open source has, you need to offer the things that open source offers. If you want to do some novel thing, that's fine, but your novel thing will have to earn its reputation.

Why use the MIT license when the AGPL is the better choice? I don’t understand why developers choose MIT and or Apache license and then figure out that they now have a competitor cloning their product .

> As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source.

This statement is 100% correct. Open means open for everyone. There's a "but they are providing FOSS as a service on a proprietary platform", which seems like the next step on the LGPL-GPL-AGPL stairway of licenses, but SSPL failed to convince anyone it was a necessary freedom:

- MongoDB Inc obviously had no plans to release their own SaaS platform under SSPL

- AWS source code being released wouldn't have benefited anyone other than maybe other major cloud providers

The weird part is that these companies/individuals will use proprietary software with no qualms of the sort they express for these "source available" licenses.

What's wrong with "source-available" ?

Open-source normally means there's no use restrictions, but there could be some requirements in order to do so (like attribution).

Free software normally means there's no use restrictions, but modifications can mandate maintaining the modifications also free to use, retaining the same freedoms.

And if you fray from those, you can call it source-available and the specifics of what usage restrictions exist are per-license.

> we should find a term (better than 'source-available' [...])

That term already exists: it's proprietary software.

If you're going to restrict what users can do with their copies of the program, please do not try to label the program as Free Software / open-source.

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

I think some people lose sight of the difference between the theoretical possibility of competing forks/implementations/services and the practical possibility. If a big enough organization gets ahold of something and begins to drive it, the fact that it's nominally open source may not be enough to ensure that people have a practical ability to get out from under that organization. In other words you need not just openness of "information" but actual open space to maneuver in the real world of food and money and markets and so on.

In many cases for-profit companies have taken up (or created) open source tools and made use of them in ways that still benefited the community at large. But it's not clear to me that FOSS licenses as we know them actually guarantee that. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to want to build safeguards against open source software being weaponized or co-opted for unfree purposes.

One thing that's not clear from the Bearblog dev's post is whether he would be open to small-scale "competitors" who share an ethos similar to his own. In theory such competitors could be granted special license exceptions. If I were in his position I could see myself wanting to exclude big companies (and companies that hope to become big) while allowing small operators. The challenge is to create an enforceable license that encodes that, rather than requiring the author to manually approve or deny each request.

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

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

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

That is exactly the stance. If there are strings attached that means some people can't use it, it's not really open. (GPL has strings attached if you use it, which is bad in a different way)

I don't think anyone has a problem with the non open source licenses themselves. If you start with a closed source license or whatever, that's fine. It is switching from an open source licenses to something that is not.

A lot of the projects that later switched out of open source would have never gotten any traction if they started with the license they ended up with.

> As far as I understand it, the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source, and they'll get very upset at you if you claim it is.

There are factions in open source advocacy, ranging from laissez faire views of freedom to views of freedom as something that needs some limitations to conserve it and prevent abuses/tragedy of the commons/etc.

I've long thought there needs to be some sort of "cooperative source" license. With DAOs and whatnot, there's even the possibility of an automated global common fund for contributing and supporting. There's definitely a big opportunity to rethink things in this arena.

I'm not 100% convinced that these licenses actually work. How hard would it be for a BigCo to have an intern to modify the code enough so that it's not an easily detectable violation?

I mean this stuff isn't just theoretical, there have been video games where we only find out they violated the GPL after a major code breach. [1]

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

> we should find a term (better than 'source-available', which is cold and doesn't capture community projects accurately)

it's not copyleft, it's a version of freeware license

There’s no such thing as a “free ride” on software that is given away freely.

It’s a gift. Once you gift it, it is no longer yours, it belongs to the people to whom you have given it to, to do whatever they wish with.

Why the scare quotes, the first freedom of both Open Source and Free Software is the right to run the software for any purpose. It's not some little unimportant detail. It's arguably the most important property of Open Source.

> if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source

That's because then it isn't. Sorry, but you can't just take terms with an accepted meaning and decide they mean something else, without any conversation or consensus from there people using that term.

The OSI has a specific definition of what "open source" means[0]. Restricting what users of the software can do in this way is in direct opposition to parts of that definition, so no, if you do that, then it is no longer open source.

I'm not saying you aren't entitled to set up your licensing that way. I think it's disgusting when the likes of Amazon decide to take someone's hard work and use their massive oligopolist position to trivially outcompete anything the original author might try to do to make some money.

But that doesn't mean it's open source. I think people need to stop being so afraid to call their software something else. They seem to be really attached to the idea of being an "open source developer", and don't want to drop that moniker even after changing their licensing away from open source.

People also need to stop licensing their software under true OSS licenses, building a community of regular, significant contributors around it, and then changing their licensing (which they can do because they've [IMO shadily] required contributors to reassign copyright). That's a huge bait-and-switch, and people are right to be upset when that happens.

In the case of Bearblog, it seems like the author is really the only significant contributor, so I think what he's doing is totally fine, for the record. Frankly I think he did this the right way: his announcement email is entirely reasonable and sympathetic, and he doesn't try to breathlessly claim that his software is still open source.

[0] https://opensource.org/osd [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.

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

> the stance of the 'Open Source' crowd is that if Amazon can't make it one of their AWS offerings then it isn't true open source

Exactly! As RMS famously put it[0]:

> It is essential, for the sake of true freedom, that every user - including the humble billionaire overlord who owns a rocket factory - has the unfettered right to run the software we, the noble proletariat of unpaid maintainers, lovingly craft in our basements at 3 a.m. Our highest ethical duty is to empower Jeff Bezos to instantiate yet another Kubernetes cluster that bills government agencies by the millisecond, for freedom means all users, especially those with yachts shaped like smaller yachts. Therefore, to deny Amazon the liberty to exploit our software without a cent of reciprocation would be to shackle the very essence of the Four Freedoms, for Freedom Zero is, and always has been, the sacred right of the richest man alive to squeeze the last drops of value from our volunteer patches while whispering “thank you for your contribution” into the abyss of a PR bot.

On a more serious note:

> I argue that the natural winner-take-all dynamics of the marketplace are not beneficial to the the mission of free and open source software.

Now, if said software was intended to run on users machines to actually empower the user, we wouldn't be in this pickle, wouldn't we?

I don't see Amazon freeloading off of GNOME, KDE, LibreOffice, Blender or GIMP.

No, I would argue the root cause of the problems here is that bros want to own their users (saas to the moon) and think open source is the way to do it. I say, fork those people!

As the author of Bear put in this very article:

> I wanted the code to be available for people to learn from, and to make it easily auditable so users could validate claims I have made about the privacy and security of the platform.

>

> Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service.

Nowhere here is the intent for users to host the blogs themselves. No, he wants uses to use his service, not his software.

Fair enough, but that shouldn't have been open source in the first place. The author is just rectifying a mistake he made previously.

If the author had actually wanted end users to use his software, he wouldn't care who runs it. Look at Hugo, they're doing alright.

> enabling these companies to ensnare unsuspecting users

Well, to me, as a user, Bear is the company that ensnares me unexpectedly, because it tells me it's running open source but the minute I want to run it myself, oh no, I'm freeloading.

Whenever I see a project that requires a Kubernetes cluster to do something people would have in the past done in 15 files of C, I know they don't care about me as an empowered user in the "free software" sense. They see me as "a user" in a drug-addict sense.

F that.

[0] he never said that, obviously

Wait, you’re saying open source shouldn’t exist just to be free labor for billion dollar companies and hustlers? Or to dump free product on the market to make it impossible to compete with said billion dollar companies?

>What Herman is doing is a service to us all

I don't owe that guy s*it, what are you talking about.

He's actually doing a disservice to the OSS community, as there's now another story of OSS turning non-OSS out of greed, which damages (by a bit, but still) the whole aura that true OSS has built over the past 40 years.

[dead]

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