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

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

#131

Post by crazygringo »

neilv wrote: post #115
crazygringo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.)

Ok, but corporations also lie to and defraud their employees all the time. In ways large and small.

Nobody is entirely honest to everyone about everything in their workplace. You really think everyone is actually sick on every single sick day, or that every single doctor's appointment on their calendar is a real doctor's appointment? People never make excuses to their manager that are lies? Managers never lie to their employees about a justification or a deadline or a promise or a policy?

Workplace dishonesty is everywhere. Because workplaces are made of human beings. It's just something you learn to manage in a realistic way. People are mostly honest, but they're never entirely honest.

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

#132

Post by smashed »

kunzhi wrote: post #118
smashed wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that they probably use it or at least discovered it explicitly because it's open source. So either you don't release it and they use something else, or you release it and they use it. Option 2 sounds like giving you more exposure and more opportunities in the long run.

[flagged]

Why so harsh?

I'm not advocating in doing it for the exposure as a primary reason. And absolutely not to be paid in exposure. 100% agree with the comic there.

I should not have used that word. It is clearly charged with negativity.

Of course I wish everyone would be compensated for their work. I feel that for some types of project, publishing as open source is a great way for people to find and use it. This can give new opportunities.

Exactly which kind of project and under which conditions is up to debate.

I have worked on a few projects that I regret not being able to open source. Mainly not my choice, stakeholders wanted traditional go to market strategies and failed/ran out of money trying to make sales. I can't help but thinking what other opportunities could have arisen have we chose another strategy.

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

#133

Post by dmoy »

TheTon wrote: post #129

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…

> 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.

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

#134

Post by appreciatorBus »

neilv wrote: post #115
crazygringo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.)

The scenario is also one of a company acting as if they own their employee's personal time.

If workplaces are going to invent dumb rules, then honest hardworking employees are going to feel justifying in working around them.

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

#135

Post by bombcar »

pentamassiv wrote: post #117
hosh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Maybe the AI sees you as a father and decided to reach out on its own ;)

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

#136

Post by TheTon »

dmoy wrote: post #133
TheTon wrote: post #129

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…

> 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 headc…

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.

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

#137

Post by bombcar »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #34
phkahler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're not complying with your license terms, sue them. If they are then I guess you missed the boat on money.

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

You can cause a decent amount of kerfuffle pro se if you have time and no money.

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

#138

Post by anitil »

erulabs wrote: post #99

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,…

Wow I would never have expected such poor behaviour, that's awful.

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

#139

Post by klardotsh »

enobrev wrote: post #63
lrvick wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tell them to fork it. Done. No need to take any grief you do not want.

Probably a bit rude, but maybe we can all agree to accept "fork off" as an acceptable, concise, and descriptive answer to unwanted requests.

Self-plug for a tongue-in-cheek license I wrote to say exactly that, for exactly this reason :) https://codeberg.org/klardotsh/fork-off-public-license

Fully agreed. FOSS maintainers don't owe you anything. You can ask for whatever you want, politely, but accept no or "maybe when I have the spoons, which may be never" as an answer, and don't push.

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

#140

Post by mattmaroon »

aurumque wrote: post #116

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…

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.
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