From their GitHub: Obviously you could self host it (and I guess plenty have figured out how to and even created competitors with the code if they are making this change?), but they discourage hobbyists from trying with this unhelpful statement. So what was the point of even being open source? Their whole statement kind of comes off as disingenuous to me because of this.

"Bear Blog has been built as a platform and not as an individual blog generator. It is more like Substack than Hugo. Due to this it isn't possible to individually self-host a Bear Blog."

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edu 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

What I find amusing is that it's built on top of Django and of course uses a few other dependencies[0], and without them the project wouldn't even exist...

0. https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/blob/master/requi...

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dinkleberg 6 days ago | parent [-]

That argument can be made for virtually every piece of software. We all build on top of the work of others.

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gkbrk 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

BearBlog built on top of the work of others. Now you can't build on top of the work of BearBlog.

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KolmogorovComp 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The argument is that why should I be able to use software for free but do not want mine to be used the same way?

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andoando 6 days ago | parent [-]

So everything should be open source and no one should be able to write software to sell it?

If you want your projects license agreement to be withheld in future projects there is a license for that. Its called copyleft

	▲	1gn15 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		That would be great, actually. AGPL for everything.

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account42 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It can and it should.

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phoronixrly 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You shouldn't look a gift horse in its mouth. Anything being open-source does not entitle you to be able to easily run it yourself. You are given the source as-is with no warranty. It is up to you to be competent enough to do anything with it and not the responsibility of the authors of the code.

If this doesn't suit you (as in, if this is a project you can't run, let alone maintain yourself), then you should consider paying someone (preferably the authors) to do so. I know this is novel to many people here who are used to exploiting the free labour of open-source maintainers, but it's been a decider in tech choices I make lately.

'Can I/anyone else at the company debug an issue and create a bugfix for this cool new open-source tech I want to introduce?' If no, then we are not qualified to run it without external help.

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indigodaddy 6 days ago | parent [-]

Well I disagree. My take: they wanted their cake and to eat it too. They wanted to be able to say they were free/open source, but really didn't want anyone to be able to utilize the code in any meaningful way. The hobbyist will be turned off because it doesn't look like there is any way to even try it out themselves on their own VPS or hardware. That seems intentional. And now, they change their license so that anyone smart enough to figure it out and make money with it, they not gonna allow that either now. Feels like we know how they really felt from the start, which is they didn't really want anyone to run this code on their own to begin with, but they wanted to still be able to claim "fully open source." IMO, even “disingenuous” is actually a somewhat kind word to how they come off to me.

	▲	5 days ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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ozgrakkurt 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It reads perfectly clear. It is designed to be a platform and mit license makes it too easy for other people to create competing services and they don’t want that.

Maybe it was a mistake on their part to make it initially open source or it is bad that there are people looking to steal other people’s work

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preisschild 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

If you don't want your work to be "stolen", and instead want to force the people to contribute back, use the AGPL

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		[deleted]

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1gn15 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not possible to steal code, since the original author still has it.

	▲	ozgrakkurt 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		It depends what it is used for. It is not so simple if they are profiting off it and you start profiting as well by stealing their customers. Maybe it is ok even then, but it sounds like it would be super annoying if the “thief” is just copy pasting the code without adding any value

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iJohnDoe 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This really confused the heck out of me. I thought Bear blog was really cool. I saw the GitHub link and had hopes to self-host. Then saw the note that it’s not possible to self-host and closed the tab and never looked back.

So this whole post on HN is confusing as heck.

Why post the code at all if you can’t self-host? But apparently you can self-host?!?

Well, I guess kudos to those that saw the note and downloaded the code anyways and tried to spin it up.

	▲	indigodaddy 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I had exactly the same reaction when I looked at the GitHub a few years ago. I was like, ok well that's weird, and didn't think about bearblog anymore