[cinericius]

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.

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.

[swiftcoder]

> 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

[jwr]

> 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

As a counterpoint, when I make something open source, I really mean "freedom", which includes the freedom to build a commercial service using the software. I use the MIT license not because of "corporate interests to undermine free software ideals", but because I really want the software to be free as in freedom.

GPL, GPLv3, AGPL and similar license actually restrict the freedom to do anything you want with the software. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with it, just that "free software ideals" could mean different things to different people, and there might not be any "corporate interests".

[tsimionescu]

Amazon offers lots of AGPL software, and they fully respect the license in all cases. Ultimately the GPL is about protecting users' rights at the expense of developers' rights. So as long as AWS can offer a better/cheaper managed version of a software service, while still giving the users all details on how to run the same service if they chose to, then the AGPL is completely achieving its aims, even if the original company goes out of business.

[LeFantome]

As I recall, Open Source was about developers collaborating to make better software. It was a pro-developer philosophy vs the Free Software movement which was all about the rights of users (and developer hostile in my view). GPL and its children are from the Free Software Tradition.

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.

[zimpenfish]

> 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.

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_...

[ksec]

>The original stance of the open source crowd.....

>The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses...

Interesting how the world have changed. The so called GPL preference, or GPL > GPLv3 > AGPL among Open source crowd is a recent thing. Arguably in the last 15 to 20 years. Both BSD and MIT dates back before GPL. And you will see far more people prefer BSD and MIT in the 90s and 00s.

I have also long argued that the license preference among generation has somewhat a linkage to political shift in spectrum. Likely to do with Tech, now known as Big tech taking advantage. And it used to be very cool if your OSS project get used by a big company, until it is not.

[nicoburns]

> 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

Is it not because corporations started funding open source projects in a big way (multiple billions of dollars a year big), and they fund projects that have licenses that they can use in their commercial projects.

To me that's a sign of the success of Open Source rather than the opposite.

[tensor]

As someone in the MIT/BSD/Apache camp, no, for me it has nothing to do with corporate interests. When I release code for free I'm doing it altruistically, and to me MIT/BSD/Apache has the most impact as it can be used in the most places now and into the future.

[gr4vityWall]

> 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.

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....

[jen20]

> 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.

s/open source/free software/

None of those licenses prevent Amazon-style freeloading though.

[Zambyte]

The original stance of open source is to cater to "free-riding" businesses. That's like, why the term "open source" even exists. You're thinking of the "free software" crowd.

[jibal]

The MIT and BSD licenses predated the GPL. People have a choice as to which ethic to follow ... it's not the result of a corporate conspiracy. (And I'm a social democrat, not a corporate simp.)

[jakelazaroff]

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.

[arp242]

Quite a few people commenting here are having problems with it in the case of Bearblog though, including some pretty wild accusations.

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.

[8organicbits]

The trick is not to get attached to a project name. `Terraform` is a trademark of IBM (previously Hashicorp). Terraform used to refer to an open-source IaC project, but now it doesn't. OpenTofu, https://opentofu.org, is probably the most accurate name for the continuation of that open-source project.

[_puk]

Sounds like we need a "forever open source" license.

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?

[bachmeier]

> 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?

[Aurornis]

> If you aren't interested in open source, that's your option, but open source has had a clear meaning for decades.

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.

[nothrabannosir]

Whether they contribute back their changes to their users.

[jaredklewis]

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.

[zelphirkalt]

I disagree. It will be harder to monetize MIT licensed projects, because any competitor can just grab and run. With AGPLv3, at least legally the competitor needs to publish their modifications as well. This in turn makes it more likely the competitor will not use your code, or if they do, in accordance with the license, which would be fine, and users of the product you build will mostly not care, because they don't even know what the licenses are about.

[NoahZuniga]

Well, many developers publish their code not because they want to specifically make a successful open source project, but because they made something that was useful to themselves, and like the idea behind open source. In that case it makes more sense to do a copyleft license because it will legally require all derivatives to also follow that open source idea.

[eadmund]

> 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.

First, if someone isn’t paying, he’s not buying. ‘Paying’ should be understood broadly, e.g. code as well as money counts. A company paying dollars really doesn’t care that much about the license — plenty of companies pay for proprietarily-licensed products (even ridiculously limited ones, with dongles and high seat prices). OTOH, a company ‘paying’ with code contributions should prefer the GPL, because it knows that its contributions will never be taken away from it.

Second, the GPL does not restrict users; it restricts developers from restricting users.

The GPL family is the right way for individuals and companies to form a software commons in which all can benefit.

[aatd86]

Understand your point, but I wouldn't be so sure. People also want to ensure that the software is being supported, the inevitable bugs being worked on, and not abandoned. It is more likely that a commercial project will be supported than a MIT licensed one. So there might not be as many github stars for such project, but on the other hand, as long as it feeds people, it will not disappear.

A MIT licensed project on the other hand, I personally consider like a potential liability more often than not. Not different from any piece of code I could find on stackoverflow. Not something that is serious. Even if it were tied to a big corpo, that would probably become fast unsupported.

[landdate]

> licensing your project GPL or the like usually means relegating it to obscurity

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.

[omnicognate]

> 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.

[happymellon]

I think the problem that these folks have is that AGPL still allows other people to host the software.

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.

[ahartmetz]

I thought so, too, at first. But there's a crucial difference: With the AGPL, Bear's competition can offer the software as as service if they publish the source code they are deploying. With the Bear license, Bear's competition just cannot offer the software as a service. It feels mostly in the spirit of FOSS to me, but Stallman would disagree. He has made it clear that there should be no restrictions on use.

[echoangle]

AGPL doesn't really prevent Amazon from making it an AWS offering unless they want to modify the program and don't want to share the modifications.

[cinericius]

Not a lawyer, but my understanding is there is a strong feeling that AGPL can be roughly ignored if a service provider provides some level of indirection (e.g. a proxy) between the user and the software. Then, the software is somehow not being accessed over a network and thus they are not required to release the source.

[jraph]

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.

[pxc]

> 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.

[benrutter]

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.

[lmm]

> 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.

[orthoxerox]

> 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

[Spivak]

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.

[cinericius]

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.

[zitterbewegung]

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 .

[vova_hn]

A lot of people are scared of GPL and other copyleft licenses, mostly because of how most big corporations treat GPL.

Also, MIT license in particular is much shorter and easier to understand for a non-lawyer, than most other software licenses.

[supriyo-biswas]

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.

[DaSHacka]

Because the proprietary software never claimed to be anything but.

[saghm]

My issue with "source available" as a term has always been that it basically sounds like a synonym to "open source". It's not clear to me why the place to draw the line for what level of restriction constitutes " would be between what's known as " source available" and "true" open source when the question of "can I read the source code for this or not" seems way more intuitive to me than "can I run a cloud-based software service for this without violating the terms of the license".

From what I can tell, the argument against including stuff that's called source available in the category of open source basically boils down to the OSI definition, but it doesn't seem reasonable to me for an organization to claim exclusive rights to a very generic-sounding term with an intuitive definition that clashes with how they want to define it. If there's a concern over the pollution of their brand, they should be trying to trademark it, and if there's not, the constant backlash against anyone using the term in a way that conflicts with their definition is pretty antisocial. I recognize that this battle is probably already lost, but I'm not sure I'll ever understand why as a community we seem to have been happy to police usage of an unintuitive definition through public pressure just to try to make a point that doesn't seem to have nearly as much consensus behind it as the expectation of uniformity would imply.

[SamInTheShell]

The history stems from the term “free” software not being very palatable for marketing. There are 4 tenants to free software. Bear is no longer free software.

[account42]

> 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.

You don't get to just redefine terms if you find them inconvenient and people are right to push back against such attempts. If you want something else, put in the work to get mind share for your model instead of trying to catch a free ride by taking over an established one.

[gr4vityWall]

> 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.

[ahartmetz]

Maximalism and lack of nuance aren't going to fix the world. Though, neither is lack of thinking things through. I'm not sure how people, including myself, would feel about the situation if the company using a "Bear-like" license was, say, Oracle or Microsoft.

[didibus]

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.

[sneak]

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.

[singpolyma3]

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

[sarlalian]

If you look at the commit graph, it’s definitely not a community project.

[thayne]

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

[BrenBarn]

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.

[4ndrewl]

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

[Illniyar]

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.

[heavyset_go]

> 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.

[jeswin]

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.

[account42]

I'd rather those "OSS vendors" would look for a better business model than software as a service.

Having the option for competing service providers (including yourself) is a big advantage of open source.

[moralestapia]

>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.

[digdugdirk]

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.

[tombert]

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

[type0]

> 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

[kelnos]

> 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.

[aatd86]

Transparent Source?

[senko]

> 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

[wahnfrieden]

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

[jakelazaroff]

Bear has no VC investors: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/

[brookst]

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

[cgijoe]

The source is ajar.

[yencabulator]

That's not open source then.

[rzzzt]

closen source?

[api]

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?