Bear is now source-available 01 Sep, 2025 When I started building Bear I made the code available under an MIT license. I didn't give it much thought at the time, but knew that 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. 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. After the last instance of this I have come to the difficult decision to change Bear's license from MIT to a version of copyleft called the Elastic License—created by the Elastic Search people. This license is almost identical to the MIT license but with the stipulation that the software cannot be provided as a hosted or managed service. You can view the specific wording here. After spending time researching how other projects are handling this, I realise I'm not alone. Many other open-source projects have updated their licenses to prevent "free-ride competition" in the past few years.123456 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". While Bear's code is good, what makes the platform special is the people who use it, and the commitment to longevity. I will ensure the platform is taken care of, even if it means backtracking on what people can do with the code itself.
First seen: 2025-09-01 15:48
Last seen: 2025-09-02 01:49