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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 sourceExactly! 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.
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> 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