20 ms·

Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

• sexyman48 1y ago
  Steve Ballmer nailed it when he said GPL is a cancer. No professional programmer wants to open source anything, but once one competitor does it, he must follow suit to stay competitive.
  • bruce511 1y ago
    Um not down voting you, but your argument has some flaws. Firstly your appeal to authority , and then using Steve Ballmer as your authority is perhaps not the best way to start. Secondly you say that "no professional programmer" - but the statement is false. For starters it's a sweeping generalization which is trivial to show is untrue for at least 1 programmer. Thirdly the existence of Open Source alternatuve does not make a product uncompetitive. You need look no further than Windows to see that's true. Indeed if we has to list all the commercial software that exists with an Ooen Source clone, we'd be here all day. I'd also argue that Joe public doesn't even know what open source is, much less factors it into a buying decision. If you are building tools for programmers (already a tiny niche target market) then you need a hook other than Open Source anyway, cause programmers are a terrible target market. I say this as someone who builds tools for programmers, and who sells commercial into a space that contains Open Source alternatives. And I do ok.
    • carlosjobim 1y ago
      Quoting Steve Ballmer doesn't mean that the person is worshipping Steve Ballmer as a god. It just means that another person expressed a similar opinion.
      • pessimizer 1y ago
        You can't add color to your argument if you've failed to add an argument. If all you've typed is an appeal to authority, you're trying to trick people into making your argument for you by trying to guess what Ballmer meant and why he thought that. Instead of getting people to try and come up with an argument that wasn't made, the argument could have just been made. But I'm sure it is a very bad argument, or else there wouldn't be that embarrassment to try.
        • carlosjobim 1y ago
          Nobody has appealed to authority. Quoting a person is not appealing to authority. And why would anybody be embarrassed about anything here?
  • wetpaws 1y ago
    [dead]
  • tliltocatl 1y ago
    The marginal cost of software is zero and therefore the just price in a perfect market is zero. You can compete on delivering features quickly (and that's how all 80-00s software was - they were able to charge simply because no one was offering same features yet), but other than that there is no way software can be a profitable product without being a monopoly - and monopolies is not a thing to be tolerated. You can sell customer support, you can sell services, you cannot really sell software forever. Hate this as much as you want, but that's how things are.
    • sfRattan 1y ago
      Looking out across the software landscape, it seems to me software companies do just fine if they achieve some-to-most of: 1. Build a piece of software that actually solves one or more problems. 2. Keep ownership private and limited. Once you're publicly traded, long term planning becomes impossible and "line must go up" becomes the reigning false god. 3. Sell a perpetual commercial license to the version-at-purchase, and offer subscription for updates after purchase. On cancellation, stop providing updates but do not disable that customer's last working version. 4. Optionally, dual license under a free license that prevents competitors from eating your lunch (usually latest GPL or AGPL, depending on context). If you're implementing the above items, it's absolutely possible to run a profitable company.
      • astrange 1y ago
        > 2. Keep ownership private and limited. Once you're publicly traded, long term planning becomes impossible and "line must go up" becomes the reigning false god. You can fight this with dual-class ownership. Google and Meta can do whatever they want because nobody can change their board. They're still motivated to care about share price because they pay their employees in shares, but you're going to have to get the money to pay employees from somewhere.
      • tukantje 1y ago
        Small nit pick: this only works if the perpetually licensed product does not have running costs for you.
• incomingpain 1y ago
  >Maybe it became a burden to maintain, This is literally why i think AI coding cant touch dev jobs. In theory you can code LOADS of projects. Want a panel widget on your desktop environment, dont even know what language its in? ask ai to produce it. but when you have open source projects, people from all over the world bring their requests and problems to you. Some are great to just merge, others you have no clue what they are doing wrong but it's totally them; and you get paid in github stars? Now there's a bunch of open source projects that are just working for me every day, but i havent modified in years and they look stagnant. but even in the non-open source realm, no dev wants to forever maintain a project. Its not a regret, just 1 dev can probably only be responsible for a handful of codebases/projects and ai coding isnt going to super expand this.
  • al_borland 1y ago
    Isn’t this the thing AI is going to claim to solve? A project exists, a user writes a feature request, the AI codes up the changes, pushes a new release, and everyone is happy. That’s the sales pitch. The big issue with this, even if it works perfectly every time, is that there is no one at the core of the project with some vision and taste, who is willing to say “no” to bad ideas or things outside the scope of the project. We’d end up seeing a lot of bloat over time. I’m sure AI will claim to solve that too, just have it code up a new lightweight project. The project sprawl will be endless.
    • pavel_lishin 1y ago
      Everything will look like PHP functions.
    • NitpickLawyer 1y ago
      > there is no one at the core of the project with some vision and taste, who is willing to say “no” to bad ideas or things outside the scope of the project. That can literally be a system prompt. "Here are the core principles of this project [...]. Here is some literature (updated monthly?). Project aims to help in x area, but not sprawl in other areas. Address every issue/PR based on a careful read of the core principles. Blah blah. Use top5 most active users on github as a voting group if score is close to threshold or you can't make an objective judgement based on what you conclude. Blah blah." Current models are really close to being able to do this, if not fully capable already. Sure, exceptions will happen, but this seems reasonable, no?
• pestatije 1y ago
  i was asked for a third party lib exemption licence, i asked for a sweetener...no, they couldn't even answer me after that
• _lvbh 1y ago
  I regret open sourcing my reverse engineering of Obsidian Sync. I did it mostly for personal use but thought it might be useful for others. After a bit of cat and mouse, they fixed all the "vulnerabilities" that let you change the sync and publish endpoints and now I'm still stuck using a very outdated version. I recently found another way to get it working on IOS again but definitely not publishing it.
  • josephcsible 1y ago
    Why do they consider it a "vulnerability" that you can change configuration of software running on your own computer? I've heard a lot of good things about Obsidian before, but hearing that basically burns it all up and means I'm going to strongly recommend nobody buy anything from them anymore.
    • dtkav 1y ago
      Obsidian distributes their software for free, and makes money on a core plugin called Obsidian Sync (note that it is not open source). Obsidian Sync relies on their cloud to offer e2ee file sync. Obsidian also has a rich plugin ecosystem with lots of open source plugins that are available and serve the same purpose (and you can use gdrive, dropbox, etc too). It makes sense to me that they released a proprietary privacy and security focused plugin (that is their core business) and they don't want other plugins to be able to arbitrarily change the server that their plugin is pointed at. Suppose they have a government customer who is using Obsidian Sync and the sync URL can be changed easily via configuration changes -- now the customer believes they are using Obsidian Sync, but actually their data is going somewhere else. I don't think you would be surprised to find that e.g. a dropbox daemon has protections to make sure it is pointing at dropbox.com. Why would you expect Obsidian to be different? (disclaimer: I work on a different plugin that adds file sync and collaboration features to Obsidian)
      • _lvbh 1y ago
        My opinion is that they should have a rule such that plugins from the official list can't modify the sync url to prevent abuse and phishing but the user should still be able to do whatever they want. The process for manually adding a plugin is already enough friction for users to be aware what they're doing is not "safe"
• hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  I've open sourced a few things in the past that I wish I could have kept closed source for monetization purposes. Probably a failure of some imagination on my part, but also, it's really hard to make and sell good desktop software if a user can make their own for free by typing `make`.
  • immibis 1y ago
    Only if your target audience is nerds. Actually a bunch of software is like this and still somehow manages to make money. It's more complicated than typing "make", I promise - I typed "make" three times in this comment and your software didn't materialize.
• bhaney 1y ago
  No
  • mike-the-mikado 1y ago
    Is that "No, I never open sourced anything"? Or, "No, I have open sourced things, but never regretted it"?
    • bhaney 1y ago
      The latter
• greyface- 1y ago
  I tried to open source a weekend personal project while at $BIGCO via their "Invention Assignment Review Committee". It turned into a minor bureaucratic nightmare and I was ultimately never given the OK to release it, or any clarity over whether my employer was choosing to assert an IP ownership interest in it. In retrospect, I wish I had never notified them of its existence, and released it under a pseudonym instead.
  • bitbasher 1y ago
    Whenever I join a company I always create a bunch of made up names on my “prior inventions” list. When I open source something I just name it after something I put on my list if the description is close enough.
    • toss1 1y ago
      ^^^^ Excellent idea and thinking ahead. Great suggestion to make in advance placeholders to contain side projects.
    • neilv 1y ago
      Do you think your colleagues have the same ideas of what is honest and trustworthy behavior? In what ways do you trust, and not trust, your colleagues? How do you feel about that?
      • crazygringo 1y ago
        What do colleagues have to do with anything? The better question is in what ways do you trust, and not trust, the company you work for? And the answer to that can be very complicated, and depend on the company a great deal. It also depends on who might buy the company in the future, and they might not be trustworthy at all.
        • neilv 1y ago
          The scenario is someone in a work environment, lying and defrauding in signed documents. Where does the workplace dishonesty start and end? Does the person think that their colleagues have the same rules, or different rules? How does that affect their work environment? (Incidentally, I'm sick of HN downvoting legitimate comments.)
• galad87 1y ago
  I wrote a small app to display a bitrate graph of video files, and posted the code on GitHub with the GPL2 license. A few weeks later someone uploaded it to the Mac App Store and sold it for 7$, the only difference was the name.
  • phkahler 1y ago
    If they're not complying with your license terms, sue them. If they are then I guess you missed the boat on money.
    • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
      Taking that all the way to court would be like $10,000, right? Big companies will sue. For individuals it's a barrier to entry
      • kstrauser 1y ago
        Yeah, that sounds like more hassle than it’s worth. It should be free to file a DMCA claim with Apple, though, and get it yanked from the App Store.
        • duskwuff 1y ago
          +1. You can put together a DMCA claim in... maybe five minutes? It's extremely straightforward and doesn't require you to do anything beyond identify the infringing work, identify what work of yours it infringes upon, and affirm that it's not authorized. Here's a template: https://library.georgetown.edu/copyright/dmca-takedown https://library.georgetown.edu/copyright/dmca-takedown
        • galad87 1y ago
          I got it removed from the App Store. The first time, then after some months the same developer republished it with a few changes under a different name… I don't have the time to track it down again, I just published my app on the App Store for free so at least people won't give in and avoid the scam.
• Scene_Cast2 1y ago
  Not the OP, but I have a similar dilemma. I'm currently sitting on a SOTA ML model for a particular niche. I'm trying to figure whether I should try selling it to the incumbents (in some shape or form), or if I should publish a paper on the techniques, and/or if I should OSS it.
  • arkmm 1y ago
    IMO if you think you can sell to users within the niche, you can publish a blog post of benchmarks and that'll serve as strong technical marketing for your niche. It also keeps open the option to sell to an incumbent (possibly helps maximize the value of that option as well).
  • dalemhurley 1y ago
    Find some VCs that have funded similar projects and see if they think there is a market and if they would fund it.
• rglover 1y ago
  I regret it only from the perspective that it opens you up to noise from smarmy, entitled, often wildly under-qualified developers trying to "get you" for not knowing something or not having some feature they claim is table stakes. And if it's not that, it's someone (who very well may be qualified) being unnecessarily passive aggressive trying to make a failure of your own seem like a show stopping nightmare that they'd never let happen. What I really don't like is that sharing anecdotes like the above often invites equally annoying "tHaT's NoT mY eXpErIeNcE" type comments which leads to a sort of "who cares, just do the best you can and ignore everybody" mindset (which can be helpful at times, damaging at others). Aside from all of that nonsense, it's great because you have other sets of eyes looking around that may see something you didn't. This is incredibly valuable if you're a soloist or small team working on a big project.
• dakiol 1y ago
  I did "open source" my static site generator. No forks, no stars, no PRs. I removed it from github since the only one who's taking advantage of it is probably Microsoft.
• jasonthorsness 1y ago
  Here is one such story of regret for paint.net (not my project but I'm a fan). I think the author's take was quite reasonable for this project. https://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paintnet-v35/ https://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paint...
• throwaway889900 1y ago
  Got death threats because I wasn't prioritizing stuff people were requesting, said nah I'm done
  • crinkly 1y ago
    Lovely people no? I had death threats once for raising a github issue!
  • pinewurst 1y ago
    I open sourced a portable benchmark program and was getting angry responses because I wouldn't accept changes to make it Linux-specific.
    • lrvick 1y ago
      Just tell them to fork it. Done. No need to take any grief you do not want.
      • enobrev 1y ago
        Probably a bit rude, but maybe we can all agree to accept "fork off" as an acceptable, concise, and descriptive answer to unwanted requests.
        • kstrauser 1y ago
          “Go fork yourself.”
          • em-bee 1y ago
            i'd go with "go fork it yourself". more correct, and less direct. makes it more like a creative insult where the recipient has to think whether they have actually been insulted or not.
            • collingreen 1y ago
• crinkly 1y ago
  About 10 years ago I was on a contract sabbatical from the usual job and the customer at the time open sourced part of the product with the wrong license, a competitor forked it and made a superior product, undercut them and took all of their customers. They had enough capital to buy the competitor but it was an extremely expensive mistake. I'm not sure they ever broke even. This was one of those niche industry specific things that no one would give a crap about if it was open sourced other than the competitor in the market. Principal architect was tossed on the street for that one.
• doawoo 1y ago
  Yup. Long long (2016 ish) ago I released an Unreal Engine 4 plugin that let people embed chromium embedded framework views into the engine via textures, so you could make fancy HUDs or whatever. Epic Games was kind enough to give me a developer grant for open sourcing and making it, cool as hell for a college student at the time, helped pay my classes. The number of angry game devs who basically wanted me to solve all their problems for them for free was astounding, additionally another dev grant receiver was jealous that I got money close to their grant for “just making a crappy plugin” (paraphrasing but that was essentially what happened) No one is ever thankful lol.
  • duxup 1y ago
    I always wonder about this. I use open source software but I'm never close / in proximity to the developers enough to say thanks. The folks who are in proximity, folks with requests and complaints.
  • socalgal2 1y ago
    I don't know how different it is for other types of dev but, AFAICT, plugin development for game engines (Unity, Unreal, Godot?) is one of the absolute worst things. The issue is that millions of new developers are using them to build a game. They have no experience. If they run into any bug at all, while using your plugin, even if it's totally unrelated to your plugin, they'll ask for free support. Say you made a plugin that serializes/deserializes to JSON. They making an FPS and the gun doesn't shoot in the correct direction. They'll ask why it's not working in your support area, even though it's got nothing to do with your plugin.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • epolanski 1y ago
    Hey! I used your plugin!! It actually paid few bills in my case! Regards.
    • doawoo 1y ago
      <3 Glad it was helpful!
• jmclnx 1y ago
  Never regretted. But my "things" are far from earth shattering and most have now have better alternatives. Only one item became a bit popular, but was written for MS-DOS ages ago and I hear it is still used by 1 person :)
  • ikidd 1y ago
    PleaseReEnableSpacebarHeating.xkcd
    • dfex 1y ago
      There really is an XKCD for everything - thank you for the morning laugh kind stranger :)
• systemdev 1y ago
  I regret open sourcing an offline patch I made for an Unreal Engine 3 game. The game was unplayable due to an always online backend that got shut down, but was still being sold so I required everyone buy a license to play with my mod. I had to reimplement stock UE3 netcode, and a bunch of other really cool stuff. Someone who was mad at me for not giving them more help when they struggled to develop on my software decided to "repack" my software and the game on a popular piracy site, both violating my AGPL license and increasing the risk that the whole project gets CnDd. I guess it's funny that a project violating a companies "no reverse engineering" clause is pissed that someone violated their OSS license, but such is life :D
  • andrewmcwatters 1y ago
    I'm very interested in your stock UE3 network code reimplementation, but I understand if you no longer publish these details.
    • systemdev 1y ago
      I'm afraid it's not as impressive as it sounds, but if you'd like to hear about it/see source feel free to shoot me an email at "the[at]realsystem.dev", I'm always happy to talk about it.
• firefax 1y ago
  I wrote a network security tool (if you can call a glorified shell script that) and it was used by script kiddies to harass people. It made me feel maybe magicians had something, when they decided some knowledge should be esoteric and earned, given that it was so trivial I never listed it on my CV. I think infosec, as a field, sometimes darts between too much obscurity and too much openness.
  • dalemhurley 1y ago
    I remember back in the 90's when the internet was just beginning and script kiddies were constantly sending Back Orifice to people thinking they were "L33T" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice
    • Joel_Mckay 1y ago
      If I recall BO was also a Trojan, and infected those with malice as well. In general, the new ML sploit-bots can fuzz and inject faster than any person. Meh, most issues are from the consumer architecture being deployed in industrial settings. Most modern Intel/AMD PC come with side-channel hardware RATs from the factory. =3
  • RajT88 1y ago
    Wizards you mean? I certainly keep my own "grimoire" of useful code.
  • justusthane 1y ago
    What did the script do? I promise I’m just curious and not a script kiddy
• riazrizvi 1y ago
  The purpose of Stallman’s open source movement was to redistribute power back into the hands of creators who were getting walled out of anything but proprietary work for an employer. If they were fired, they had nothing to show for years of work except a reference, since their deep expertise was essentially meaningless. (An experience I’m sure almost everyone here is familiar with, since we’ve all spent some years on proprietary systems). Now, with LLMs, exposing your source code essentially hands over a large chunk of your hard won expertise for free to whoever wants to use it. That old model of 100% open source is broken, to my mind. The new approach I think should be open source stubs with demos of what is capable with your additional proprietary piece.
  • teekert 1y ago
    So it should be easy to reuse your open source code, but not too easy?
    • riazrizvi 1y ago
      A ‘freemium source’ model, where you’re advertising possibility and promoting human-human partnership. Industry practices that over commoditize human talent are bad IMO. Our whole industry needs to bend its collective mind to maintaining economic participation. We’ve possibly put too much of a strain on society with LLMs. Especially as more and more people cotton on to what other services they no longer need, as models get better and better. We can’t survive as a species if too much of our lives are based on self-gratification, we have to maintain the drivers that make us interact and learn to get along.
      • teekert 1y ago
        I get the point but it still sounds to me like "what about the horse maintainers in a car world." The world is changing, we improvise, adapt, overcome. Where many species have their world model encoded in their DNA, we have a beautiful neural computer that can change its world model and resulting strategies on the fly. Let's use it.
  • trod1234 1y ago
• jamesponddotco 1y ago
  I open source pretty much everything I work on that is close to finished or finished. Never regretted doing it, but never got anything out of doing it either, aside from the feeling of paying forward. I guess it really depends on how popular your project gets. I have no idea if my stuff is used or not[1], so regretting is maybe kinda hard? I’ll keep doing it, though. Might regret it at some point, but I get so much value out of open source, it feels wrong not to. [1]: Judging by the lack of patches I’d guess my work isn’t used, though.
• ptmcc 1y ago
  To some extent, yes. Most notably, I published a little browser extension I created to scratch a personal itch. It got a little bit of attention and users, and then the feature requests started coming. Among a couple reasonable ideas were big demands like make it work on different platforms, make it integrate with other sites, or make it work entirely differently. And unhelpful bug reports that often didn't even make sense. Not one of them ever contributed to the repo, and many of them were ungracious and demanding in nature. Fortunately nothing outright hostile, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth for daring to share a neat personal project as-is.
  • ellis0n 1y ago
    If we lived in a perfect world, how much in funds would you want for your contribution to open source? (a companies or 3rd party players)
• erulabs 1y ago
  When I was ~14 I open sourced a script to autoconfigure X11's xrandr. It was pretty lousy, had several bugs. I mentioned it on a KDE mailing list and a KDE core contributor told me it was embarrassing code and to kill myself. I took it pretty hard and didn't contribute to KDE or X11 ever again, probably took me about a year to build up the desire to code again. Everything else I've open-sourced has gone pretty well, comparatively.
  • rideontime 1y ago
    And people wonder why Codes of Conduct became popular...
    • jchw 1y ago
      So, I definitely believe this story 100%: when I was on the anglosphere Internet in 200x, there was a lot of elitism and hazing rituals of sorts, among other things. It was a very real and unfortunate thing that coincided the otherwise excellent experiences (IMO) of being online at that time. Still, I really don't think most people need to be told not to tell other people to kill themselves, and in many places where I hung out when I was younger I strongly believe you would have been tempbanned for "flaming". I was a forum moderator and I can tell you I would not have hesitated. But you said the magic words, so it bears addressing; I think we all get the picture that the Code of Conduct drama usually doesn't have much to do with the actual rules that are contained within, which really aren't that controversial on their face, but rather the way in which power is moved from stakeholders within a project to other people by virtue of initiatives like establishing Code of Conducts and the governance structures that enforce them. And, I think most people will probably not get upset over the idea that telling someone else to go kill themselves might get you suspended from a discussion forum... Rather, the drama comes in when you see the reach of a project or organization's CoC start to extend outward past what people actually want to stop (toxic, unproductive communication) and past the edges of the project (and into policing the rest of the Internet.) Two notable examples I'd cite are Python with Tim Peters (who as far as anyone can tell genuinely didn't do anything wrong) and Freedesktop.org with Vaxry (who can be a bit immature, but is primarily accused of not moderating the Hyprland Discord... Which is a fair complaint about the Hyprland Discord, but not a very good reason for him to be banned from Freedesktop.org.) Of course, truthfully, there is no 100% winning answer here; if the stakeholders who have control over a project by virtue of being the original developers don't want to cede any control to people for CoC enforcement, they don't really have to (although in reality, external pressures to implement one might make it an untenable position to hold.) In that case, you have to rely on those people to hold themselves accountable to reasonable conduct, and nobody's perfect. It's kind of like when police departments conduct internal investigations and find no problems; even if you're pretty pro-police, you must feel somewhat skeptical that they actually were reasonably impartial in conducting said investigation. But, I generally side with The Evil I Know, which is that the project authors and biggest stakeholders should generally maintain most of the power and control in an open source project including the ultimate decisions regarding moderation. In cases where developers have proven particularly egregious with their conduct, forking has proven to be effective enough as a mitigation strategy, and the fact that it comes at a cost is a sort of feature, as it's better if a power shift like that isn't easy; while I can't guarantee that the original authors and maintainers of a project will act reasonably and impartially, I can at least say that I expect them to have the project's best interests at heart, whereas the kinds of people that go around looking for established projects and organizations to join roles that have authority tend to not be the kinds of people you usually want in those roles. Having it be difficult means you need people who genuinely care about the project rather than the types of people who just kind of seek power. (And I am sorry, but there are fuckloads of those people among us and they are absolutely dirty enough to hide under the guise of anything to get a modicum of control. Running an online community for any appreciable amount of time opens your eyes to this IMO.) All of this to say, it reflects poorly on the state of the Internet at the time and KDE's mailing lists that the situation happened and was possibly not rectified in a way that is satisfactory (it sure doesn't sound like it.) The correct thing to do is obviously to issue a ban, and you don't need a rule book of any kind to figure that out. I think when people push for these things during major incidents, it's misguided at best, because usually the core problem was not that a "don't tell people to kill each other" rule didn't exist, but that people actually would've needed such a rule to decide the behavior was unacceptable in the first place. This isn't some complex gray area case. I don't think people are acting in bad faith when they suggest it as an option after a drama incident, but I still think it's the wrong knee jerk 99% of the time. (The most favorable thing I can say is that I think a CoC might possibly have value in very large projects like Linux or Kubernetes, but so far the execution has always felt like it leaves something to be desired. Seeing people occasionally openly threaten to contact the CoC committees over effectively technical disagreements leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)
• runjake 1y ago
  I don't know -- maybe. I've released several tools, and for most of them, I've heard nothing from anyone. But 3 got somewhat popular in their niche and most of the inquiries and requests were from people who seemed to think they were entitled to free support and feature requests. Many times, they got pretty rude if I refused to implement their feature or I took too long to release a fix. It really turned me off from releasing open source code and then interacting with users. I'd rather just release the code, and forget about it, only patching on my own terms.
• pentamassiv 1y ago
  I am the maintainer of a library to simulate keyboard and mouse input. I didn't start the project but took over the maintenance and have since rewritten pretty much all of the code. I recently found out that Anthropic is shipping it in Claude Desktop for some unreleased feature which is probably like "Computer Use". I noticed they had an open position in exactly the team responsible for the implementation and applied. A few months later I received a rejection. The letter said that the team doesn't have the time to review any more candidates. The code is under MIT so everything is perfectly fine. It is great that a company like Anthropic is using my code, but it would have been nice to benefit from it. I wrote a slightly longer blog post about the topic here: https://grell.dev/blog/ai_rejection https://grell.dev/blog/ai_rejection
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • jasonjmcghee 1y ago
    Thank you for enigo / all you do and your support when I used the library in my little project!
    • pentamassiv 1y ago
      You're welcome, it's nice to hear from people using it. I hope everything is going well with your new startup :-)
  • hosh 1y ago
    Interesting, considering that Anthropic spends a lot of resourced to build ethics checks into their AI. I wonder if this hiring process was ever put through its own ethics check.
    • pentamassiv 1y ago
      When you apply, you have to confirm that you did not generate the application with AI. As soon as you send of the application, you get an automatic email confirming your application. They also say they don't reach out, if you are not a good match and that they only contact the people they want to hire. Maybe they changed their mind on that policy, because I received a rejection letter a few months later. It was very well written. The people I showed it to said it is one of the nicest rejection letters they have seen.
• 4nt1chr1st 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
• aurumque 1y ago
  When I was a younger man, I fought long and hard and spent many late nights on the phone with the lawyers abroad, to convince my company to open source a tool that I was proud of and thought would help our brand and attract new developers. They finally granted approval, but I was not allowed to accept features or updates, customer service, spend time on fixes, accept pull requests, etc. Unfortunately my name was all over it, and I came to hate the fact that I had championed this, forced to watch the code rot and interest wane because the company couldn't fathom anything OSS besides lobbing some dead code over the wall periodically. After I left I would still receive emails from frustrated users, but I had no access anymore. I could have forked it, but it just seemed too messy. I made some suggestions and wished them luck. There is a lesson here, somewhere, but mainly it just convinced me to not rock the boat for the next decade, and to seek out smaller companies for employment.
  • mattmaroon 1y ago
    I think we all have to learn the lesson, when we are young, that forcing people to do something they really don't want rarely ends up going well. You always hope they'll later have some epiphany that you were right, but they almost never really do what you want them to (you wanted them to support the open source project) and even if you were right, they'll rarely figure that out.
  • nurettin 1y ago
    Given the energy, time and willingness I'd just develop it as an anon collaborator like yournamescrambled@email
• alexnewman 1y ago
  No because my standards are nonexistent
• saltcured 1y ago
  Can't say I regret it, but did not enjoy when a small enhancement PR I wanted to push to an academic visualization toolkit took more of my time to wrangle the licensing than to write the patches. When I did veer into enterprise environments, I regretted the NDAs I signed. It was annoying to later want to share some illustrative anecdotes but have to censor myself. And it wasn't like they were state secrets, just stuff that was amusing and apropos but someone might be able to trace back to the NDA contract period due to the small world we seem to inhabit. Otherwise, I've been in university-linked R&D and generally went with folks who declared projects open source before we began any real effort on it. That's the only way to be sure.
• nadermx 1y ago
  I think with anything, it's a love hate. I open sourced https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover, and it's been cool in terms of vanity, but depending on my mood it either feels cool or like a chore to do work on it.
• booleandilemma 1y ago
  I don't open source anything, because we live in a world where people who get jobs and rewards are not the same people who put in the work. I don't wish to feed that system. Other comments here are great examples of why no one should.
• blibble 1y ago
  I regret everything I ever open sourced my works had one condition: attribution now it's all been slopped up by "AI", without attribution, primarily to devalue the labour of software developers
  • ivanjermakov 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • Lerc 1y ago
    I think it is generally accepted that AI should not reproduce works that others have the right to. I think most people developing AI consider it a mode of failure when it does reproduce a copy of its training data. It remains an open question on who's responsibility it is to not distribute infringing AI works. The developer or the the user of the AI. Legally it is unclear due to a lack of cases providing precedent in such a new situation. Morally I think AI developers do consider it a duty to reduce such behaviour to a minimum, but also believe that the benefits of the AI are significant enough that it would be unreasonable to block access to them because of the existence of failure modes. When it comes to being "slopped up" which is a weird phrasing in itself, but I gather you are trying to repurpose the term "slop" to add additional pejorative tone to you words. I'm not really a fan of 'slop' as a term for AI output because it is used specifically as a term for AI output. Should it be used as a blanket term for low effort, mass generated content it would be reasonable, but when it seems to apply specifically to AI it carries the implication of prejudice. Choosing to move it to a verb describing input removes all of the meaningful aspect of the term leaving only the prejudice. Just go with "slurped up" That brings us to what training actually is, Reading. There is no requirement for attribution to read something. There is no requirement for attribution to learn from something. The restrictions on reproduction are there in recognition of your work representing the ideas. The ideas themselves are not copyrightable, This is widely recognised legally and morally. Scholars have written volumes on why this should be the case and how bad it would be if the alternative, a world where people could own ideas themselves, were true. Imagine the wealth imbalance that exist in today's world, now extend that imbalance from money to the very ideas that you use to express yourself. AI should not reproduce your work by terms you have not agreed to. You have a valid complaint when it does that. My concern is that people appear to be extending their claims to suggest that they control the right to be learned from. That is not true, right, or moral.
• TheTon 1y ago
  No regrets here, but I did use Google Code a fair bit prior to GitHub and I had an experience that made me think maybe Google regretted that product in some ways. Around 2005-6 I wrote a Mac OS X client for Xbox Live. The idea was I wanted notifications on my computer when my friends came online and started to play certain games, so I could turn on my Xbox and join them. This is a feature of the Xbox mobile app today of course, but back then all you could do was either be on the Xbox or sit around refreshing a web page, so the app was useful. I published the source and the binaries on Google Code, partly because I just wanted to share the app for free, and partly because I wanted to be transparent that I was handling the Xbox login credentials safely. One day the app blew up and got a lot of coverage in tech news and link aggregators (like Digg, haha) and I suddenly had a ton of users. Eventually I figured out why. It wasn't that my app was so great exactly, but rather the idea that Google was writing a Mac client for Xbox made a great tech news story. However, that part of the story wasn't true, the project had nothing to do with Google, I was just hosting it on Google Code because it was at the time the most convenient place for a small open source project. The episode made me wonder how often that happened. How many other projects on Google Code became part of a news cycle because people misinterpreted them as being written or endorsed by Google? Was that part of why Google Code was shut down?
  • dmoy 1y ago
    > How many other projects on Google Code became part of a news cycle because people misinterpreted them as being written or endorsed by Google? Was that part of why Google Code was shut down? I don't remember the exact details, and I was way in the backend (Kythe), not the frontend part of it. But my extremely hazy recollection is it probably had more to do with the gwt deprecation than anything else. There was headcount for awhile put on making an angular (?) replacement for the old gwt frontend, and I guess that didn't extend to also making a replacement for Google code. Again, super fuzzy recollection here, from someone 2 teams away.
    • TheTon 1y ago
      Wow, thanks for the insight. It's sort of crazy to think about how big GitHub has become, and how much Microsoft paid for it, but of course it wasn't the first product in the space at all. Right time, right place, right features, I guess, and maybe Google Code was missing a bit of each of those.
• bob1029 1y ago
  My current position is a source available license for any product I am working on solo. You can definitely get at the source code, but I'm gonna make you pay me money first and sign an NDA. I strongly believe in the principles of OSS for things like frameworks and tools that everyone in the community can benefit from. But, when it comes to extremely complex end products like Word, Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc., it's a lot harder for me to buy the community-is-better argument. Even in some cases the frameworks & tools being semi-proprietary has major benefits (.NET/Visual Studio dev experience). There are tradeoffs with everything. The key is focusing on the customer. Who do you want to keep around as your customer? You aren't going to make everyone happy. Someone is always going to be pissed at your particular approach. Might as well take a path that makes you a little bit of money if you can.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  Not personally, but twice in my career I’ve been part of interview loops with people who had created semi-famous open source projects. Projects that you’ve heard of if you read a lot of HN, but not so critical that you couldn’t think of another alternative if it disappeared. Both of them expressed regret for not commercializing it. The weird part for me, as the interviewer, was hearing them imagine how wealthy they’d be if they had commercialized it instead of releasing it as open source, entirely neglecting the fact that the projects became popular because they were open source. I imagine this is the thought process behind the various projects that try to go closed-source and commercial after a certain point.
  • senderista 1y ago
    A project can't be monetized without getting wide adoption, and it can't get wide adoption without a permissive license that precludes monetization :(
    • astrange 1y ago
      There's two models that solve this. a) sell support contracts b) have contributors sign copyright agreements, license the project as GPL/AGPL, and then sell commercial licenses for people who can't use that
      • dochtman 1y ago
        No, they don’t. Selling support contracts is actually hard. GPL/AGPL preclude widespread adoption (these days) — the grandparent explicitly mentioned “permissive” licenses.
        • astrange 1y ago
          All businesses are hard, but I don't think selling support is especially hard for one. The above two are how x264 development was funded, but it's also how Klara works for BSD and Igalia for web browsers.
      • 1y ago
• ahaucnx 1y ago
  We went full in and not only open sourced the firmware of our air quality monitors but made it completely open source hardware, this means it includes the electronic schematics, enclosure files etc. [1] I believe it was the single most important decision we took as a company and probably also contributed to a large part to the growth and success we are having now. It enables us to build a really strong community, and also differentiate ourselves clearly from other manufacturers that are all pretty much only offering proprietary solutions. But I think people need to be aware that by open sourcing, they put the company on a different trajectory. For example you are basically making yourself a lot less attractive for VCs. When I see how much other companies can get investments that help them grow faster and make more impact is the only times when I sometimes wonder if other models might have been a better option? [1] https://www.airgradient.com/documentation/overview/ https://www.airgradient.com/documentation/overview/
  • cosmic_quanta 1y ago
    What's the regret then?
    • ahaucnx 1y ago
      I hit sent too fast on this one and added the missing part.
  • catskull 1y ago
    Air Gradient has and will far outlive any of your VC backed competitors. Your devices are not e waste. I think we’re totally valuing the wrong things.
• dn3500 1y ago
  In 1981 I wrote a tool that is still in use today. You can install the package on most major linux distros. This was before we paid much attention to software copyright, and I simply published it with my name on it and no license. About six months later someone took my code, removed my name from it, made some small changes that didn't change its behavior at all, and re-published it. By that time I had moved on and wasn't aware that it had started to take off. The man page now has someone else's name on it as author. I don't really regret publishing it but I wish I had put a copyright notice and license on it.
  • pabs3 1y ago
    Which tool is that?
  • lhmiles 1y ago
    Tell us the tool!
  • Sloowms 1y ago
    It's probably hard to prove with something from 1981 but no license or copyright doesn't mean the source is open for taking. It basically means you just haven't set a license and could do that at any time, rugpulling the code from anyone who uses it. This is why projects like Fedora and Debian make sure everything they ship has a license.
    • me-vs-cat 1y ago
      > ...with something from 1981 but no license or copyright doesn't mean the source is open for taking. Are you sure? That's before the US joined the Berne Convention, and also not long after the Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980.
• brikym 1y ago
  Yes - I open sourced a web game which was promptly ripped off and plastered with banner ads. The copycat impersonated me on social media claiming to be the developer. I promptly made the repo private and made many improvements after that point in time so the damage wasn't too bad. But the copycat got a better Google ranking which focused people. There are also a lot of link-farm sites where web games are proxied and embedded with links to other games. The embedding problems went away once I used Cloudflare. This confused a lot of fans as they'd find the awful ad-ridden copycat site. So my advice to anyone with a side project which isn't a library is to keep it private and behind a CDN.
  • Aachen 1y ago
    This is a concern for many developers, but I haven't heard of it actually happening when the software isn't crazy famous. Sorry to hear this. Wonder if it's rotten luck or actually a common problem :/ A middle way might be to do like some people and use a license that allows only viewing the code for some months/years and then allows all the normal software freedoms after that time. In the meantime, you get to work on it and keep yourself ahead of any copies that would need to work off of old versions, but if you get hit by a bus or for other reasons abandon it, it's automatically open sourced. I kinda like that mechanism because there's so much abandonware where it would have been really cool to have this. Though, if it's a serious concern that someone copies it like this, it might be a lot of pressure unless the source-available time is very long
• Joel_Mckay 1y ago
  In general, being a point of contact for a small community project means you sometimes get weirdos showing up to your door IRL, or various other scams and abuse. In terms of software we usually used Apache 2.0, LGPL, and GPL licenses. Anecdotes: 1. FOSS e-Commerce tax module for merchant account gateway was resold as commercial software to several local businesses by a "startup". Didn't care until years later when we started getting spammed with support requests given the original email was in the source, and the "startup" had moved on to other ventures. 2. Wrote industrial drivers for integrated manufactured equipment, and due to remote locations it was important service people could modify/rebuild the open code as needed. We tracked prototype product GPS telemetry to a Singapore University campus, and saw a copy of the GUI at a trade show the following year. No more FOSS in commercial releases. 3. Built generic 3D printing hardware for our local club activities, and within a few months it was a product on Aliexpress. The problem was it was the Beta firmware design, and again people that paid for something that was supposed to be free get irate about support. 4. Built a small OS distro for Ham radio, EE, ROS, CNC, and 3D printing. Of the 8000 users only 2 people provided any sort of participation in maintaining the build. Also, many people were paranoid there was some sort of nefarious purpose even when meeting them in real life. “Free as in free beer” tends to make people suspicious in real life. 5. Tried to expand existing FOSS software, but get ghosted by the community when trying to learn about their code (stare into the void of ambiguous documentation.) Most FOSS communities are great, but some people just don't want to know about you or your silly problems. Better off with your own project fork version specific to a use-case, and share under a similar hands-off library support model. 6. Built custom FOSS IT infrastructure, and had publishers switch licenses years later. Makes people look like fools when a certain now well known vendor cold-call solicits a $8k support fee for something they probably broke on purpose 2-weeks prior. Re-wrote it in 3 weeks, and never exposed core systems to a “trust me bro” crowd again. 7. Took a few foundation courses to clear up the WTF deprecated vestigial garbage moments in the kernel source. Realized the value proposition is just not worth the perpetual Beta and political hassles. Started writing my own toy kernel that is just as odd as the hardware it is meant to run on, as traditional architecture problems just do not handle parallelism cleanly. Don’t ask, seriously… lol 8. Tried financial & bug support for other small FOSS projects we think are cool, but around 60% of the time projects are abandoned/EOL within 2 years. Building a user base around that is impossible. I am sure there are some folks that fair much better, but in general most FOSS problems I saw are economic and or political… from a technical perspective Open source has proven more reliable than most commercial options. Thus, prefer FOSS projects that serve your specific needs first, write something that fits your own use-case if you must, and expect zero community support unless your team lucks out. YMMV =3
• 65 1y ago
  This sounds bad but the only reason I open source my projects is because to publish on NPM as a free account I need my packages to be public, and therefore my packages need to not be horrible and have no documentation. Otherwise I'd just keep my packages private.
• senderista 1y ago
  I don't understand why more projects haven't adopted the "open-source, closed-contribution" model of SQLite. Seems much more sustainable than the default model where a maintainer is expected to review every patch and respond to every issue.
  • kccqzy 1y ago
    Last I checked GitHub doesn't even allow you to turn off the Pull Requests feature on a repo that you do not want contributions to.
• OnionBlender 1y ago
  Obviously not me, but I remember John Carmack regretting releasing Doom and Quake under GPL instead of BSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#:~:text=The%20source%20code%20for%20Hovertank,the%20more%20permissive%20BSD%20license. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#:~:text=The%20sou...
  • bsimpson 1y ago
    Look into toybox. It's a tiny reimplementation of GNU coreutils that ships in Android. The author was on the core team for another project in that space (I think busybox). He saw first hand how copyleft sounds good but ends up being lots of friction with no practical benefit, and vowed to public domain all his projects after that. BSD0 is him giving a name to a public domain grant so OSS people could recognize it.
    • lproven 1y ago
      Rob Landley, and the original Busybox author was Bruce Perens, who with Eric Raymond co-popularised Christine Peterson's new term "open source". https://lwn.net/Articles/202120/ https://lwn.net/Articles/202120/
      • DonHopkins 1y ago
        [dead]
        • lproven 1y ago
          > Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek Who is of course a frequent HN poster, one of the very top rated on the site. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek I remain strongly suspicious that this column of his is in fact a long and convoluted troll: https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ That got about 2.5K upvotes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063
    • bsimpson 1y ago
• socalgal2 1y ago
  I don't have any super popular repos but I do have a few with 500 to 1500 stars and while not necassarily regret, I don't think I've ever gotten a single pull request that I could just acccept as is. Even though the README links to live tests (browser JS libs), the person submitting the PR rarely includes tests so that's one issue. Sure I can say "I'll be happy to accept this if you could please add some tests?" but then that leads to the 2nd issue. PRs are rarely quality PRs and if I want to add the feature I end up having to re-write whatever they were trying to add from scratch. I know people are claiming LLMs will make things worse for many projects but an LLM can likely at least read what's there and try to make things that follow the conventions? I also know I'm under no obligation to accept any PRs. It's not that easy to say no for me, depending on the ask.
  • alexchantavy 1y ago
    If this is something that you want to solve, I've found that having a PR template checklist that asks contributors to include tests helps a lot. Say something to the effect of [ ] Added unit tests [ ] Included a screenshot of the code working (this helps reviews go faster)
  • izabera 1y ago
    I post a lot of silly personal code on GitHub and the vast majority of issues/pull requests I receive are completely inane and generally not remotely helpful. Things ranging from "I've added a subtle shadow effect to the title in the readme" (thought it was someone's first pr just to get started but that wasn't even the case) to "I've added support for $obscure_system_youve_never_heard_of" (well meaning but the code is now 4x longer and a maze of ifdefs so maybe you should just keep it in your branch?) to "I tried this on my extremely outdated system that's old enough to vote and it threw an error" (yes it very much will throw an error, none of this can work there and I cannot help you). But a few people have reported certain fundamental problems with my approaches or have otherwise put in a significant amount of work to debug and fix issues, and they've been extremely helpful and I can only hope I'll get more of them in the future.
  • inferiorhuman 1y ago
    Tangentially I'd just add that ttf-parser and Git Oxide made iterating on PRs a breeze. Absolutely a pleasure to contribute to.
• WalterBright 1y ago
  Nope. I should have gone open source much sooner.
• monster_truck 1y ago
  Hell yes. Had a particularly insane minor contributor take the project and put it up on the store without asking. After I had it taken down they did things like harass my family and threaten me. They caught federal charges for interstate threats and found themselves 'retiring from tech' not long after. That aside, have had two other projects take off and get flooded with normies demanding things on social media/github. I now do each under throwaway names and sell them to people who want the appearance of having shipped
• cookiengineer 1y ago
  There's no point in regretting a situation where you believed in the good faith of other people. If you do that, you will eventually lose with depression or other heavily overfitted reactions. I build open source for myself, and for myself first. Not for others, not for appreciation, not for "likes" or similar. I don't expect anything in return. If you want to be part of it, start to contribute. But with everything in life, trust has to be earned slowly over time. Having said that, I always believe in the good of people. Though I am pretty sad and disappointed how some parts of the internet made me their artificial enemy because I don't submit to social pressure and couldn't care less about the chan folks. Always remember: The loudest on the internet are not the most.
• broken_broken_ 1y ago
  I wrote a toy Kotlin compiler, for fun. Then one day a Jetbrains employee opens an issue which only says: “Why? Just why?”. Maybe it’s the language barrier… but I did not find that particularly polite. On the other hand I open sourced my blog and received lots of small contributions to fix typos or such which were nice.
  • bruce511 1y ago
    Obviously I can't change how it made you feel, and as such it was a crappy reply to receive, but on one level at least it's a genuine question that projects should have an answer for. It kinda matters if you build something as a proof of concept, or you build it to exercise some new technique, or you build it to improve the state of the art, or you build it as the foundation for a product etc. You wrote it "for fun". That's an excellent reason to write something. I can appreciate your effort in that context. It's going to have rough edges etc. And when it's not fun anymore you move on. Someone else might write the same thing, but for a different reason. Maybe they want a "better Kotlin compiler". They intend to make it perfect, build a product around it and so on. This sort of project encourages a different level of scrutiny than something fun. So giving context to a project helps attract the right kind of attention. And more importantly the right kind of other-peoples-time. But yeah, asking like that is not terribly polite.
    • fastasucan 1y ago
      >genuine question that projects should have an answer for. Just because they take issue with the wording doesn't mean that they don't have an aswer for that question. Also, that is an awful entry point for a discussion about the purpose of the project.
  • daxhuiberts 1y ago
    I think this might be an appropriate response to that question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auC0s6km21E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auC0s6km21E
  • brabel 1y ago
    The guy was probably upset that someone might be trying to compete with them while their compiler is itself open source. But it still sucks that they couldn’t be more subtle about it. In the end both they and you got upset. A small change in his tone and you might both come off with a nice feeling, him for knowing you were just playing around, and you for perhaps getting recognition from a Kotlin dev.
• dave_universetf 1y ago
  I wrote MetalLB, a bare metal load-balancer for Kubernetes, because I needed one for myself. It gained some popularity because for a couple years, it was the only way to get working L4 LB outside of clouds. These days I believe a couple of the CNIs added support for external BGP peering and integration with k8s's LB machinery, but that came years later. As a result, I became network troubleshooting tech support for a large chunk of people trying to run kubernetes on bare metal. If you've not looked at k8s's networking, debugging even your own cluster's networking is a nightmare, never mind debugging someone else's over slack, while (usually) simultaneously having to give them a crash course in intermediate/advanced networking stuff like asymmetric routing and tracing packets through netfilter so that you can then tell them that networks can't do the thing they wanted and no amount of new features I can add will change that. Meanwhile companies selling bare metal k8s services started bundling MetalLB, but kept sending their customers to my bugtracker instead of taking some of the load themselves. The experience burned me out severely. It's been several years and I still have a visceral negative reaction to the idea of open-sourcing code I wrote, and when I infrequently do they come with a fairly blunt "contributions no welcome" message and a disabled issue tracker. I handed over the keys to MetalLB a long while back now. I hope the new maintainers and the project are doing okay. I'll mention a positive of that time as well, to balance it out: as an experiment I opened a pinned issue asking happy users to drop me a note (https://github.com/metallb/metallb/issues/5 https://github.com/metallb/metallb/issues/5), and many did. It was nice occasionally getting a notification that wasn't a complaint or demand for support. At one point someone left me a note that it was being used to support research projects at NASA JPL and DARPA. That was pretty neat.
  • 123pie123 1y ago
    retrospectively, could you have made some good money for your support?
• db48x 1y ago
  Never.
• poemxo 1y ago
  I haven't had the chance to write anything open source, but now with AI everywhere I don't think I will
• jongjong 1y ago
  I don't regret open sourcing my libraries. One of them got some traction and provided me with opportunities which eventually led me to earn passive income for 3 years and I was able to live in Malta, going snorkeling in the Mediterranean every other day while working casually on whatever side projects I wanted. That said, I feel like things could have worked out better given how much time I invested beforehand and how everything had been clicking into place until my 5 year plan fell apart suddenly around the time of COVID. It all went perfectly until the very end when other people's irrationality and corruption ruined everything. I probably won't be open sourcing my more innovative recent work. I'd want to see traction before I open source that one and I'm not convinced that open sourcing would make a difference in terms of getting traction. When something could benefit from being open sourced, it's kind of obvious. I think if I hadn't open sourced that other project, it would have gotten me nowhere and I would have gotten no value out of it so that was definitely the right move. My more recent work is a serverless platform. I really wish I could open source it. It's probably better than anything else of its kind but I'm not convinced that people would understand the value provided because you have to use it for at least 1 hour to have your mind blown... But I can't convince people to invest 1 hour into trying it. Big chicken and egg problem. Also, my understanding of business is that it doesn't make sense to offer a product whose quality exceeds people's perception limits. Outside of the luxury sector, nobody will pay for surplus value which they cannot fully sense, not even if it's 'free'; they won't invest their time. Also, my target audience are developers and they often like using suboptimal, time-consuming tools which allow them to do busy-work. They charge by the hour after all. It's like the target audience is communist so it's stupid to look at them through a capitalist free-market lens.
• azalemeth 1y ago
  I was about 13 and contributed to an Apple open source mailing list -- I forget which one. I included the entire email chain and got a very very stern telling off from the list maintainers for doing so and my code sunk without a trace. I didn't try to release code again until the end of my PhD.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• notanaverageman 1y ago
  Not that I regret it, but I found out that creating a community around an open source project is not like what you expect. I've been working on a tool for a very popular project for more than two years, adding features, refining it etc. since I had my time. Reading many comments on HN and Reddit on how people don't like current dominant tool or its alternatives, what features they expect etc. I thought I've got one that people would like to use. I have open sourced it and shared it on a few places and got zero traction. Ok, I thought, I can talk about it here and there, so it would get more visibility. People don't like it much since I'm promoting my own tool. I posted a blog post about some technique on tool's website and people seemed to like it on Reddit. A few people wrote comments like "interesting" or "amazing" and I was happy for the first time. Then someone wrote that you should not make your friends/alt-accounts comment on your posts, it's cringe and that happiness went away. I've been a lurker on social media nearly whole my life. Putting myself out there feels like an unpleasant experience. I'm still deciding whether to continue or just go back to lurking and keep my tool to myself.
  • jraph 1y ago
    > I'm still deciding whether to continue or just go back to lurking and keep my tool to myself. I'd be inclined to suggest not to let the 1% annoying people spoil it for everyone else if you can help it. Most people know to see through and recognize these annoying people and their toxic comments and know to appreciate the good work. Sharing your work as open source is still an amazing thing to do despite the annoying vocal minority and many people appreciate it even if they don't say much. Of course, your own sanity and health is the most important thing. Thanks for having shared your work as open source until now and good luck for the future, whatever path you end up choosing. Also: write your open source stuff for yourself. Share it but don't wait for validation. That's bonus but your motivation should come from inside. IMHO.
  • latexr 1y ago
    > creating a community around an open source project is not like what you expect. > (…) > Then someone wrote that you should not make your friends/alt-accounts comment on your posts, it's cringe and that happiness went away. Respectfully, if you’re that easily discouraged you should not in any way attempt to “create a community”. Having a popular open-source project isn’t glamorous, it’s extra work for you. It’s entitled users making demands and opening crappy bug reports, punctuated by the occasional decent contributor and even rarer exceptional one. Make your tool available and let it be. Mention it only when relevant, and even then think twice. Make it clear the tool is for yourself and you may accommodate respectful requests which make sense for your vision of the project, but make no promises. Do what’s enjoyable, don’t try to chase fame and notoriety.
• ivanstepanovftw 1y ago
  My worst experience is to submit two decent PR that was ignored by maintainers. I had burden to support them for a month, solving merge conflicts, solving new bugs in the main branch that were merged without testing, and to adapt test system to prove my changes are solving something. And then I saw that maintainer not just ignores but closes every else PR with these words: > your contributions are too undisciplined and difficult to review. please just make sure there are issues filed for the problems and let a core team member or other contributor solve it. [1] I have directly asked maintainers to merge at least one PR [2], because I see someone is in the middle of refactoring whole backend, but got ignored. I have rage closed all my contributions and made most of my projects private. I think I will never go open ever again. [1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/21426#issuecomment-3082302574 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/21426#issuecomment-30823... [2]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24317 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24317
  • Philpax 1y ago
    Wow, what on earth? That second link is not a good showing. I assume there must have been some out-of-GitHub interaction to provoke that kind of response.
    • ivanstepanovftw 1y ago
      The only out-of-GitHub interaction was as Zulip chat, where I asked maintainers to review and merge it [3], and another one to Ali, telling him my feelings about getting banned for closing my contributions, discussing further actions. Two deleted messages on ZSF had this content: > SPIR-V at master is still broken. I tried to help Zig. But PR never gets merged. I had to update it 3 times. It lasted for a month. I have updated all SPIR-V dependencies. You don't care about SPIR-V anyway, why I was threatened this way? > Sorry for my contributions. I was really disappointed when I wrote this, and I thought that nobody should see this to not harm maintainers and the project itself, so I deleted them. Then I got banned on Zulip without a reason. I just wanted to make Zig closer to 1.0 release. [3]: https://zsf.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/454360-compiler/topic/spirv/near/531187902 https://zsf.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/454360-compiler/to...
  • 1y ago
• julik 1y ago
  I have regretted releasing OSS under the umbrella of employers, and will likely not do so in the future. And while I never regretted releasing OSS as such, I did often have regrets that while I know the software was better than what was currently available in the market, me being bad at marketing meant that it would still not get any use.
• vermaden 1y ago
  Never.
• giis 1y ago
  To be honest, I do regret it. After 20 years of working on FOSS projects, I've invested enormous amounts of time, effort, and money into these and other free/open-source initiatives. It was enjoyable initially - there's something addictive about receiving praise from strangers and unknown communities. You keep going because it feels good and you develop a sense of moral superiority. But years later, when the people closest to you are no longer around - you pause and reflect on how much energy you devoted to random strangers instead of those who shared your life. If I had invested even 1% of the time and effort I put into FOSS projects into my relationships with loved ones, they would have been so much happier. Now I'm left wondering what the hell I was doing all those years https://giis.co.in/foss.html https://giis.co.in/foss.html
  • poszlem 1y ago
    This is a very thoughtful post, and I sympathize with the sentiment, but I don't think it's really about "open sourcing" anything. The same could be said if you spent that time building model trains, working on a car, or engaging in any other hobby.
    • ljchen 1y ago
      Agreed. "Open sourcing" means you do it for free but your work benefits others. And you may have an opportunity to pass the torch to others. For hobbies you keep it to yourself. I played an instrument for many years in spare time. I enjoyed it a lot. I eventually gave up, because my life changed and many other things popped up. On reflection, I still think it was an intersting experince for all those years. But I don't feel anything for it now.
    • npteljes 1y ago
      Yes, it's not different from a workaholic for example. So in this vein, not on topic, because it's not about the license. Still, it's a good lesson, and is technically an answer to "regretting open-sourcing something" - it's just that OP reconsidering open-sourcing their life, not their software.
  • siva7 1y ago
• GoToRO 1y ago
  Just add to the license "if you are a megacorp you owe us $1000+ per year". I don't understand why it's so hard.
  • elric 1y ago
    When I was younger, I would have been annoyed at this remark because it detracts from the ideological purity of FOSS. Now that I'm older, I laugh at its naïveté. $megacorp wouldn't pay you. The junior engineer at $megacorp who pulled in your library wouldn't even have read the license. And you as a small FOSS engineer wouldn't have the legal clout to make them pay. You wouldn't even know they were using your library. But in principle I agree that it would behoove profitable companies who benefit from FOSS to either pay or contribute.
    • GoToRO 1y ago
      They would pay, once their product depends on your work.
      • elric 1y ago
        Would they? Their products depends on the work of thousands of FOSS contributions. And historically, the vast majority of companies haven't contributed or paid. All they've done is take. There have been numerous cases of GPL violations and other misappropriations of licenses. I don't see why a "Pay me $1000"-clause would be any different. Was at a talk by the curl maintainer a while back, he has a stack of emails from entitled companies that expect him to work for free. It's mind boggling.
        • GoToRO 1y ago
          There are companies that will pay because not everybody is mental. With that money you can enforce the license for the others. It doesn't have to be perfect.
  • jpetso 1y ago
    It's not open source anymore once you add this; open source is defined as having equal terms for everyone. That said, a few entities are advocating for something like this, e.g. Bruce Perens with Post Open (https://postopen.org https://postopen.org) or FUTO with "source first" (https://www.futo.org/about/futo-statement-on-opensource/ https://www.futo.org/about/futo-statement-on-opensource/). A big hangup with all of this is, who is "us"? Whom do you owe money to? The original author? What if I end up forking the software without the original authors involved, am I going to do it for free with all the proceeds going to people who aren't working on it anymore? Or all future contributors? Using which formula to divvy up that money? Lines of code, useful bug reports written, number of tasks triaged, number of tasks resolved, documentation authored, users supported - what determines the relative amount of your contribution? Who receives the payment(s) from $megacorp, can they be trusted to redistribute it among contributors? What happens when the original maintainer / payment receiver steps back or scales back their contributions? How to avoid the divvy-up metric being gamed by people who care more about the money than the quality of the software? Yes, it's possible; no, "just add to the license" doesn't cut it. This is a much bigger question. How you answer these questions determines whether your project even preserves open source's main (user-side) benefit of forkability.
• elric 1y ago
  The opposite. I regret not pushing harder to be allowed to release more things as open source. Built lots of useful tools at a previous job that would have benefited "the community", and while management initially seemed happy to open source them, the request was never granted. Now I frequently find myself building things and thinking "damn, wish I could use that to make my life easier". I'm keeping the details vague because I think I'm still bound by NDAs.
• vegancap 1y ago
  Not quite an open-source project, but I did a massive blog post series on Microservices in Golang. It sort of became a bit of a defacto starting point for a while, it was an immense amount of work and effort. But I found my inbox flooded with people asking for advice, and honestly, writing about it all made me realise how ridiculous Microservices often are. I could tell many of the people asking me didn't really need them, and I found myself trying to advise them away from it. So I ended up with loads of work, but with caveats all over the place trying to convince people they didn't need any of it. Then I accidentally wiped the database powering my blog, lost all the content, and had loads of people asking me to rewrite them all. Most people were polite, but there were a lot of pushy and entitled people as well... It's a bit of a shame because it was by far the most popular thing I ever did, and they ended up being a massive pain and regret
  • 4gotunameagain 1y ago
    How did something as popular not find its way to the internet archive ?
    • vegancap 1y ago
      Never checked to be honest, could well be on there
    • tukantje 1y ago
      I think it is these ones - especially since I can see that they turned to 404 pages later down the line - in order of parts 1 through 5; - https://web.archive.org/web/20220823113634/https://ewanvalentine.io/microservices-in-golang-part-1/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220823113634/https://ewanvalen... - https://web.archive.org/web/20220823104052/https://ewanvalentine.io/microservices-in-golang-part-2/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220823104052/https://ewanvalen... - https://web.archive.org/web/20220820044449/https://ewanvalentine.io/microservices-in-golang-part-3/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220820044449/https://ewanvalen... - https://web.archive.org/web/20220811080027/https://ewanvalentine.io/microservices-in-golang-part-4/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220811080027/https://ewanvalen... - https://web.archive.org/web/20220820045729/https://ewanvalentine.io/microservices-in-golang-part-5/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220820045729/https://ewanvalen...
• burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Never invest into FOSS time, money, or energy and expect anything positive or monetary in return. Having unreasonable expectations is a self-imposed trap and sure to lead to resentment and/or burn-out.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• Suzuran 1y ago
  I made the mistake of open-sourcing something that attracted a large mob angry that an outsider had intruded upon their space. Got doxed, death threats, and my employer was also harassed. Even after I publicly abandoned and repudiated the project I still get crap about it. I now caution everyone who talks about open-sourcing their projects to consider which groups might feel that the existence of the proposed project represents an attack against them and what threat those groups may pose when they dedicate themselves to your removal.
• aleksi 1y ago
  I open-sourced my MongoDB alternative, and all I got was this lousy lawsuit.
  • unsuitable 1y ago
    [dead]
• donatj 1y ago
  I regret using the MIT License on a couple of my applications that others have picked up and monetized. I do not regret making their source available for people to learn from and extend. I'm not even mad they're making money. I just would have liked, in hindsight, to have used a license that guaranteed me some iota of credit in the finished product. Particularly in things where I built the entire finished product - that is to say applications, not libraries. MIT is fine and good for libraries, but full blown tools where I built the actual UI, and people aren't even extending it but are just re-hosting it and in some cases claiming they created it? I should have used something else. I wrote a post about it that got picked up by certain types and used as an argument against open source generally. That interpretation is almost as frustrating as the situation with the licenses, and isn't what I was attempting to say at all! I love open source, I love the MIT license. I just think it makes more sense for me to use on libraries than finished applications. https://donatstudios.com/License-Grumbles https://donatstudios.com/License-Grumbles https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39413562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39413562
  • pabs3 1y ago
    The MIT license does require attribution, in the form of the copyright notice, which must be included in all copies of the code, including ones built into a binary. Even if you had made it AGPL, people deliberately violate that all the time, and usually the only recourse is enforcement through costly lawsuits.
• Jotalea 1y ago
  I've been told my code sucks and I should be ashamed of having it in my public GitHub profile. I've been told there were too many RCE exploits on all of the software I made, but the reporter didn't specify what software has the exploits (could be anything from my personal website, my forum, my link sharing site, my fangame, to my discord bot; they didn't specify). And even though I did get attacked by spam on my own forum, I made a workaround for it and it worked. Since then I've been making proprietary software only, but distribution is harder this way (at least for me).
  • Jotalea 1y ago
    But I'm planning to return to the open source by making useful, niche, small software, and adding it to the AUR.
• garganzol 1y ago
  I regret for not open-sourcing certain things soon enough! Sometimes, a project or an idea is bigger than just a single human or company. So keeping everything only for ourselves is a very narrow strategy. By openly sharing the knowledge, we can pass the sparks to future generations. Including future versions of ourselves after we die and get reincarnated.
• ellis0n 1y ago
  I want to set my open-source project afloat . What should I do to receive a relevant reward?
• jgerrish 1y ago
  I have two groups of things I've put online that I think I'll regret short term but not long-term. They're both about understanding of statistics at their heart. But in vastly different ways. The first is my first set of amateur Rust projects. They're built around a Covid-Era project to reverse engineer the LucasArts SCUMM games, specifically Loom on the Atari ST. It was a fun project that led me through Atari STX disks to FAT file systems to SCUMM virtual machines. And a few side projects along the way with CRC32, Adler-32, Fletcher and flawed checksum algorithms. Including using a kolmogorov-smirnov test to show issues with Adler32 on small data sizes. I use the math, and it's a great project to learn about hypothesis testing and polynomials. But I can't explain it all. Just enough to be dangerous. And the APIs are shit. But it's out there and it was fun. The second isn't really code. It's a comment somewhere about Microsoft and Valve and purposefully designing systems like UEFI for political purposes before the "What the fuck is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care" issue struck. It was about how these large-scale global political and standards wars hurt normal developers, even if in the end they will help others. But I mentioned dead eyes because I was talking about exhaustion and just going along with trends instead of fighting back. My comment might have been construed as violence against women. It wasn't in any way. As I go through CT and fMRI tests into the future we can show that it's not always what it seems on the surface. But it is my fault. It was a stupid mistake that wasnt thinking about imagery in a larger context. Statistics shoes violence against women is a bigger issue, and that's the truth. So, I'm sorry.
• dongking2 1y ago
  I'm new to Hacker News and just starting to explore open source myself. I haven't had the chance to open source anything yet, but reading everyone's experiences—both positive and negative—gives me a lot to think about. Looking forward to learning more from this community!