On the Bear Blog license change
Article written by winther
On the 1st of September, Herman, the creator of Bear Blog, announced that he was changing the open source license from MIT to something based on the Elastic License, which emphasises that the source code cannot be provided as a hosted or managed service. This has spurred some reactions from blogs, and discussions on Tildes and Hacker News.
This is not meant as an opinion piece, but more as an overview of the various concerns, arguments, counter-arguments and comments on the issue.
Promises
Some people have expressed that they feel this breaks the original promise of Bear Blog with its commitment to open source. As a user on Tildes puts it:
I can understand how it might feel to see people take your open-source code and set up their own paid services, when you're running a service yourself. But why does this "hurt"? If you chose a freely open license to begin with and other people take your code and build their own products with it... that's fully in the spirit of the license you originally chose. Also wouldn't you be glad that more people are using your code and doing their own things with it? Sure, there's no requirement for them to contribute back, necessarily, or make any major modifications, and I get how that can feel like just being "copied"... but this whole response just seems off to me and against the entire spirit of the licensing they chose in the first place
The change is also compared to similar license changes on bigger open source projects:
Ah yes. Pulling up the ladder always works well. I guess there weren't too many contributors to browbeat into allowing the change of license. How long before 'Cub Blog' releases on the last MIT licenced release and eats their lunch. Maybe they should ask redis? This sort of relicensing of existing projects is disgusting. Don't want your pet project used by people? Well okay, make a closed source one.
But don't make it open, build a community and then slam the door. That's just scummy.
This refers to some controversial license changes made by big projects like Redis and Elasticsearch where the projects started out with permissive open source licenses that fostered a lot of contributions, only to then latter âpull the rugâ for commercial reasons.
However, other people say that that is a comparison that goes too far:
Operated by an individual (not a big corporate entity) who made the source open for people to tinker with personally. Provides the service itself for free and is now finding other entities running with the code and charging people a lot more for it. [...] One is the a creator trying to prevent their work from being commercially exploited by others without contribution, the others are powerful entities on a whole different magnitude of scale.
On the other hand, a user on Hacker News finds the license to be best way to achieve the projectâs goals:
I really believe this is the best model or licensing. I care about seeing the code and being able to modify it to suit my own preferences, but I also care about the project being healthy and the maintainer being able to earn from their efforts without worrying about cheap competition.
It should be noted that the license change doesnât work retroactively. Everything up till the license change is still available under the original MIT license, for anyone to fork and use as they see fit. As some people point out, the freedom open source licenses provides also means freedom for the maintainer to change the license. The new license will only apply to all future development Herman does on the project.
Open source vs free software
This leads to the next big topic on the differences in just open source and free software, which many of the above disagreements ultimately lead back to. These terms are being used somewhat interchangeably though:
They claim they "believe in open source" and then got "bitten by it". In actuality it seems like they never believed in open source in the first place. Open source is a philosophy. It's based on the belief that I should be allowed to know what runs on my computer, and I should be allowed to freely modify the behaviour of code running on my computer, because it's MY computer. If there are restrictions on my ability to modify code on my computer, then it stops really being my computer: I am giving the developers of whatever program I'm running power over my computer.
I think what happened here is that the developer realised that the open source philosophy at its core is incompatible with the capitalist commercialism mindset. The notion of writing code, freely sharing it, and letting others modify and contribute so that everyone can benefit, is too socialist. Everyone benefits, but no one person profits. If you see other people improving upon your code as a threat to your status rather than a mutually beneficial development, then you shouldn't make your code open source. It's as simple as that.
Open source software is big business. That big tech companies like Google or Microsoft are maintaining and supporting various open source projects is not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it serves their business. Having tools and libraries open sourced allows its use to spread, comes with lot of free bug fixes and additions from developers from other companies that are using it and they can then have huge leverage over the tech world beyond their own company. Usually those projects are licensed under very permissive licenses such as the MIT license as it allows for commercial use without disclosing modifications.
The free software movement prioritises freedom for the users, not the developers as such. Its focus is on allowing users total freedom to modify and change the software they use, and one way to try and enforce that was the GPL license. A license that requires any modifications to also be released under the GPL. It doesnât prohibit commercial use.
With the license change, Bear Blog is therefore still open source, but not free software as it comes with restrictions on how it can be used. Hermans also explicitly said he didnât chose something like the AGPL as it doesnât prohibit others from running the software as a service.
As a user on Hacker News puts it:
There are two freedoms of different people (or rather different roles) that are in conflict here: the freedom of developers to do whatever they would like to do with code that they have access to, and the freedom of users to be able to change and control the software they use. MIT/BSD/etc prioritise the former, while GPL prioritises the latter: free software advocates generally believe that proprietary software is immoral, and that all software should be open to users to modify, even if that limits developers freedom to keep it secret. The GPL is an attempt to enforce this as much as can be achieved under current law, not a natural reflection of their wishes (which would compel all software to have source code available for modification).
Though some people point out that that isnât really applicable for Bear Blog, as there isnât an existing big community built around it. It is a solo developed project with the purpose of providing a hosted service. It is not meant to be used to self-host your blog.
A user on Tildes says:
Bear blog itself is a free service and while the license was open source already did not accept contributions for quite a while. Which is reflected in the fairly short contributor list. [...] Basically what I am getting at is that this isn't some sort of big corporate entity trying to pull a rug pull. There is no effective self-hosted user base of the software itself, as they already operated effectively on the "source available" model. Operated by an individual (not a big corporate entity) who made the source open for people to tinker with personally. Provides the service itself for free and is now finding other entities running with the code and charging people a lot more for it.
There are many different reasons and motivations for providing free or open softwars, and many reasons to not do it. Hermans principles on âbuilt to last" doesnât make the choice of software license easy all things considered.
Threats to the business
All this came about because Herman felt threatened. In his own words:
Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service. And it hurts. 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. It hurts to have poured so much love into a piece of software to see it turned against you and threaten your livelihood. It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it. [...] We're entering a new age of AI powered coding, where creating a competing product only involves typing "Create a fork of this repo and change its name to something cool and deploy it on an EC2 instance".
The ideals and collaborative benefits of free and open source are challenged by the ubiquity and ease of taking advantage of free software. In a sense, before it was to some extent being gate kept by a skill level, and many skilled developers want to share their code with others. Jamie writes:
This isn't just one developer's bad day. Herman's anguish signals a seismic shift reshaping software development, where artificial intelligence has weaponised the very openness that built the modern internet. The collaborative spirit of open sourceâonce protected by the sheer difficulty of meaningful copyingânow faces an existential threat from AI tools that can clone, modify, and deploy competing projects faster than their creators can respond.
The license change of Bear Blog is just one shift among many in the open source, that according to Jamie has to redefine how to apply the principles of free software in a world where AI tools are accelerating things:
The question isn't whether restrictions reduce innovation, but whether they redirect it. Traditional open source assumed abundanceâunlimited developer time, infinite collaborative goodwill, and benevolent corporate participation. AI-accelerated competition has revealed these assumptions as dangerously naive.
A user on Hacker News shares a similar sentiment on how to best protect the beneficial elements of free software:
I argue that the natural winner-take-all dynamics of the marketplace are not beneficial to 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.
Other people are less convinced that this should be a big threat to Bear Blog specifically, as the value of using Bear Blog is more than simply blog hosting. Full disclosure, this is my comment on the topic on Tildes:
The value Bear Blog provides isn't really with its tech, but with the community that is built around it. Someone being able to spin up a copy-cat product is not really something I see as a big threat to what herman has built with Bear Blog. It is like an empty instance of Facebook is pretty worthless in itself, as it won't attract users anyway.
Another responded that they use Bear Blog for technical reasons, but Herman himself is also part of it:
I wouldn't be capable of having my own website so to me value is the tech and Herman himself. It is quite a privilege for a non-programmer to have a company founder as tech support. I try to not bother him too much but yeah, it's nice. The kind of content I put up is not relevant for Bear's community and I completely removed votes from my posts. So I am definitely there for the tech and the Hermann.
While there are plenty of very critical commentary on this license change, it should be noted that most of them come from an angle on general principles and less about Bear Blog itself. It doesnât look like a huge numbers of Bear Blog users are leaving the platform over this.