4 ms·

What is the motivation behind open sourcing code at all if you're not going to open source it all? I don't mean this to be an asshole, as I truly want to unders

by squigz 3y ago

What is the motivation behind open sourcing code at all if you're not going to open source it all? I don't mean this to be an asshole, as I truly want to understand the motivation.

sbierwagen 3y ago
Shareware. See the open source preview, pay a million dollars for the full version.
- danielhanchen 3y ago
  I wouldn't characterize it exactly as "shareware", since the OSS version is fully functional, trains 5x faster on a single GPU. The paid version just makes it train 30x faster on multi GPU platforms - it's more of an open core approach.
ShamelessC 3y ago
This is, I believe, part of the Y Combinator playbook. You want to get as much growth as possible using any means you can think of then flip the pricing (or tracking) on as soon as it peaks. Alternatively you can sell your company or go public. The company here does seem less sinister however - don't think they've accepted VC investment yet? Could be wrong.
- danielhanchen 3y ago
  No we don't have any funding! I'm grateful to my family to supporting us till now. We're open to VC investment now, except we truly believe in bootstrapping it - we have tonnes of other products in the pipeline like a Recession predictor, a Data Science Consultant, our own trained chatbot via DPO and our fully cleaned datasets and more!
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    Refreshing to see, especially on this forum! Best of luck.
    - danielhanchen 3y ago
      :) Thanks!
danielhanchen 3y ago
Good point - the main issue is we encountered this exact issue with our old package Hyperlearn (https://github.com/danielhanchen/hyperlearn https://github.com/danielhanchen/hyperlearn). I OSSed all the code to the community - I'm actually an extremely open person and I love contributing to the OSS community. The issue was the package got gobbled up by other startups and big tech companies with no credit - I didn't want any cash from it, but it stung and hurt really bad hearing other startups and companies claim it was them who made it faster, whilst it was actually my work. It hurt really bad - as an OSS person, I don't want money, but just some recognition for the work. I also used to accept and help everyone with coding up their startup's software, but I never got paid or even any thanks - sadly I didn't expect the world to be such a hostile place. So after a sad awakening, I decided with my brother instead of OSSing everything, we would first OSS something which is still very good - 5X faster training is already very reasonable. I'm all open to other suggestions on how we should approach this though! There are no evil intentions - in fact I insisted we OSS EVERYTHING even the 30x faster algos, but after a level headed discussion with my brother - we still have to pay life expenses no? If you have other ways we can go about this - I'm all ears!! We're literally making stuff up as we go along!
- kristopolous 3y ago
  There's a variety of licenses some of which protect you from this problem. Maybe those would be appropriate?
  - danielhanchen 3y ago
    Sadly I've tried GPL3 for Hyperlearn and AGPL3 - those licenses only work for UI or Database based OSS - eg MongoDB, Gitlab etc. I still haven't figured out how to open source algorithms which don't have an UI or database - maybe a training or inference platform? But if we made a training / inference platform, then there won't be any OSS code. We're currently stuck in the middle - do you have any suggestions on this?
    - Jayakumark 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by squigz 3y ago

What is the motivation behind open sourcing code at all if you're not going to open source it all? I don't mean this to be an asshole, as I truly want to understand the motivation.

sbierwagen 3y ago

Shareware. See the open source preview, pay a million dollars for the full version.

danielhanchen 3y ago
I wouldn't characterize it exactly as "shareware", since the OSS version is fully functional, trains 5x faster on a single GPU. The paid version just makes it train 30x faster on multi GPU platforms - it's more of an open core approach.

ShamelessC 3y ago

This is, I believe, part of the Y Combinator playbook. You want to get as much growth as possible using any means you can think of then flip the pricing (or tracking) on as soon as it peaks. Alternatively you can sell your company or go public. The company here does seem less sinister however - don't think they've accepted VC investment yet? Could be wrong.

danielhanchen 3y ago
No we don't have any funding! I'm grateful to my family to supporting us till now. We're open to VC investment now, except we truly believe in bootstrapping it - we have tonnes of other products in the pipeline like a Recession predictor, a Data Science Consultant, our own trained chatbot via DPO and our fully cleaned datasets and more!
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Refreshing to see, especially on this forum! Best of luck.
  - danielhanchen 3y ago
    :) Thanks!

danielhanchen 3y ago

Good point - the main issue is we encountered this exact issue with our old package Hyperlearn (https://github.com/danielhanchen/hyperlearn https://github.com/danielhanchen/hyperlearn). I OSSed all the code to the community - I'm actually an extremely open person and I love contributing to the OSS community. The issue was the package got gobbled up by other startups and big tech companies with no credit - I didn't want any cash from it, but it stung and hurt really bad hearing other startups and companies claim it was them who made it faster, whilst it was actually my work. It hurt really bad - as an OSS person, I don't want money, but just some recognition for the work. I also used to accept and help everyone with coding up their startup's software, but I never got paid or even any thanks - sadly I didn't expect the world to be such a hostile place. So after a sad awakening, I decided with my brother instead of OSSing everything, we would first OSS something which is still very good - 5X faster training is already very reasonable. I'm all open to other suggestions on how we should approach this though! There are no evil intentions - in fact I insisted we OSS EVERYTHING even the 30x faster algos, but after a level headed discussion with my brother - we still have to pay life expenses no? If you have other ways we can go about this - I'm all ears!! We're literally making stuff up as we go along!

kristopolous 3y ago
There's a variety of licenses some of which protect you from this problem. Maybe those would be appropriate?
- danielhanchen 3y ago
  Sadly I've tried GPL3 for Hyperlearn and AGPL3 - those licenses only work for UI or Database based OSS - eg MongoDB, Gitlab etc. I still haven't figured out how to open source algorithms which don't have an UI or database - maybe a training or inference platform? But if we made a training / inference platform, then there won't be any OSS code. We're currently stuck in the middle - do you have any suggestions on this?
  - Jayakumark 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]