4 ms·

My brother gave me a formative bit of advice. You can never take it back. Once you make it, and put it out there, what was yours is now everyone's. I'm a FLOS

My brother gave me a formative bit of advice. You can never take it back. Once you make it, and put it out there, what was yours is now everyone's. I'm a FLOSS diehard, but I do not write and release much software for the express reason that I simply don't trust other people not to abuse the crap out of things. I set my end-of analysis posts much further than most (I tend to assume culpability beyond the 4th degree of seperation, where most prople abort at 1st or second for the purposes of my own analysis; impractical? Seems like, but has thusfar had a reasonably high success rate at helping me be able to sleep at night) Note: I know ot seems contradictory, but it's one of the reasons I admire people like Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and the FSF/EFF as much as I do. The courage and conviction they demonstrate in my opinion truly makes them remarkable people.

turtleyacht 4y ago
This is kind of a fantasy workflow of mine: creating software for personal use, studying the implementation of others, and improving it--and no one has to see the code. It could always be licensed, but only if and when I had time to be both maintainer and a manager (of sorts). I see a comment on HN from time to time about this. Someone building their own browser commenting on some implementation detail, but that's it (for example). Because, once it's out there, yes--others can use it, or as you say, abuse it. Do you have a (sanitized) example of how your thinking helped protect your software from being "exploited?" (And here I mean the abuse you refer to.)
- turtleyacht 4y ago
  Er... It sounds like the comment above condones outright software theft. I do oppose that. If an HN comment discusses an idea that could help in a personal software project, I would want to try my own implementation. I don't mean go to the (possibly GPL'd) repo and just copy-paste everything. At the same time, if it's my own project--even so a business plan, an investment strategy, or hardware schematic--attribute the credits, and go try it out. The reason I'm on the fence with starting out proprietary or with the first commit including the LICENSE is that the latter is safest; and, it's easier to build with the intent to share from the start, then to clean it up later, even if it's never open-sourced. But if it's exercise 7 of chapter 4 from a textbook, it's harder to predict a large, popular project grew out of that. Adding a license to everything seems overkill. Disciplined, but overkill.

turtleyacht 4y ago

This is kind of a fantasy workflow of mine: creating software for personal use, studying the implementation of others, and improving it--and no one has to see the code. It could always be licensed, but only if and when I had time to be both maintainer and a manager (of sorts). I see a comment on HN from time to time about this. Someone building their own browser commenting on some implementation detail, but that's it (for example). Because, once it's out there, yes--others can use it, or as you say, abuse it. Do you have a (sanitized) example of how your thinking helped protect your software from being "exploited?" (And here I mean the abuse you refer to.)

turtleyacht 4y ago
Er... It sounds like the comment above condones outright software theft. I do oppose that. If an HN comment discusses an idea that could help in a personal software project, I would want to try my own implementation. I don't mean go to the (possibly GPL'd) repo and just copy-paste everything. At the same time, if it's my own project--even so a business plan, an investment strategy, or hardware schematic--attribute the credits, and go try it out. The reason I'm on the fence with starting out proprietary or with the first commit including the LICENSE is that the latter is safest; and, it's easier to build with the intent to share from the start, then to clean it up later, even if it's never open-sourced. But if it's exercise 7 of chapter 4 from a textbook, it's harder to predict a large, popular project grew out of that. Adding a license to everything seems overkill. Disciplined, but overkill.