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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?

#241

Post by astrange »

sfRattan wrote: post #126
tliltocatl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

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

#242

Post by ozim »

Aurornis wrote: post #151

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…

I get pretty angry by those type of people.

„Open source and free*” asterisk for „until I get traction or VC money”.

That’s bait and switch and riding on community good will.

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

#243

Post by bapak »

galad87 wrote: post #19

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.

This is extremely common. As far as I know any open source app that is remotely interesting will be downloaded, renamed and republished. And this is why a lot of such apps are no longer open source. One example is Sinder Sorhus, which has thousands of open source npm packages but zero open source iOS apps, even the free ones are closed source.

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

#244

Post by bigstrat2003 »

crazygringo wrote: post #131
neilv wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

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

That's 100% true, and lamentable. But two wrongs don't make a right. And while one can't control the company's behavior, a person can control their own behavior. As such, it is perfectly reasonable to criticize them when they choose to act without integrity.

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

#245

Post by grepfru_it »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #197
grepfru_it wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow old war wounds from teenage days opened up. My friend kept locking himself out of root and would be forced to single user the system to recover. This was difficult for many reasons, including remote hands costing up to and including $50 per call. I decided to look into why su would only work with root. Found a very simple check that I thought was unreasonable. Made my first patch and proudly posted to the Free…

You still hold the copyright to your patch, and the governance of FreeBSD is so much better now. I know a former FreeBSD core team member who I'm sure would love to see you get finally credit for your work :) I'd be more than happy to put you in touch - email address in my profile if you're interested.

Hey thanks! I hold copyright like a stack overflow post owner holds their copyright. In reality, the change was maybe 4 bytes, it got wrapped into a “refactoring” commit and tada no need to reference the OG author. I played the same games back then too, so I ain’t even mad.

I will still reach out because BSD dev was a small community back then and we have probably crossed paths!

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

#246

Post by 7bit »

grepfru_it wrote: post #153
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,…

Oh wow old war wounds from teenage days opened up. My friend kept locking himself out of root and would be forced to single user the system to recover. This was difficult for many reasons, including remote hands costing up to and including $50 per call. I decided to look into why su would only work with root. Found a very simple check that I thought was unreasonable. Made my first patch and proudly posted to the Free…

I noticed something that looked like inconsistent behaviour with the arch installer, and I wanted to learn why it looked like that to me. I asked in the forums a bunch of questions to understand the process better, with the aim to improve the installation guide for everyone else after me.

I was told I should just ignore the error messages I was seeing. When I kept asking, some of the most active members started insulting and ridiculing me. Then others started joining in.

The only thing I had in mind was to improve the guide for other people new to arch, that came after me. Instead, I was only insulted and ridiculed. I uninstalled Arch and never did anything with it again. The toxicity of that community still makes me angry today.

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

#247

Post by xlii »

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,…

Ehh.

When people reminisce about "the old internet" they tend to forget how hostile it was.

Being devils advocate it wasn't common for young people to engage in the activity but harsh and unfair critic was happening often.

It still exists today, but in much smaller scale than back then.

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

#248

Post by bravetraveler »

ozim wrote: post #242
Aurornis wrote: post #151

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…

I get pretty angry by those type of people. „Open source and free*” asterisk for „until I get traction or VC money”. That’s bait and switch and riding on community good will.

With enough social media, anything is possible

- Mullenweg, or some other hack

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

#249

Post by izabera »

socalgal2 wrote: post #200

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…

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.

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

#250

Post by rcakebread »

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,…

In the early days of the PERL Usenet group, I asked my first question and used the word "newbie" to describe my skill level. I got an automated reply scolding me for using the word "newbie".
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