It's always sad when someone removes their project from the free software world.

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).