Blogging platform Bear is no longer open source, moves to source-available Elastic license

Bear, a privacy-focused blogging platform developed by Herman Martinus, has transitioned from its previous open source MIT license to a source-available model. The platform will now be distributed under the Elastic license, which closely resembles the MIT license but explicitly forbids users from offering Bear as a hosted or managed service. This change marks a clear departure from Bear's earlier philosophy, where full open source availability encouraged widespread reuse.

According to Martinus, the decision was influenced by repeated instances of Bear's code being forked and used to launch similar competing services with only minimal changes. While the source code remains accessible for personal use and modification, the new license aims to protect Bear from what its creator describes as free-ride competition.

This move is not isolated. In recent years, several open source projects have shifted their licensing to address the rise of direct competitors operating hosted versions of rebranded forks. Advances in AI-assisted coding have lowered the barrier for developers to fork open source projects and quickly launch paid, competing platforms, further fueling this trend. Bear’s new approach reflects a broader effort by independent developers to retain some control over how their software is commercialized.