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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?

#271

Post by inferiorhuman »

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…

Tangentially I'd just add that ttf-parser and Git Oxide made iterating on PRs a breeze. Absolutely a pleasure to contribute to.

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

#272

Post by teekert »

riazrizvi wrote: post #76
teekert wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it should be easy to reuse your open source code, but not too easy?

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 mode…

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.

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

#273

Post by epolanski »

doawoo wrote: post #42

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 al…

Hey! I used your plugin!!

It actually paid few bills in my case! Regards.

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

#274

Post by conradfr »

broken_broken_ wrote: post #228

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.

That seems a prevalent attitude at Jetbrains based on how they answers on their Youtrack.

It's hilarious, especially their UI team that only follow trends but still know better than their users.

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

#275

Post by anon_e-moose »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #244
crazygringo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

That leads to a society where people are punished and corporations are not, simply because they are too big to be criticised.

Much more often than people, large and publicly quoted corporations end up becoming inherently evil.

The total self-serving lies made by individuals will always be a drop in the ocean when compared to the self-serving lies of a single S&P500.

They're both wrong, but the real issue here is to start by criticizing and correcting the corporations, not the people. Once it feels like a drop in a glass of water, we can start thinking of criticizing the people.

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

#276

Post by dash2 »

epolanski wrote: post #270
crystal_revenge wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t be naive, these companies don’t care about talent they care about prestige and credentials. @ standford will always beat “did actual work relevant to the project”. Just look at the background of some of the names in this at these places. As always it’s “who you know and where you’ve been” not “what you know and what you’ve built” edit: You can downvote if you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that high stake…

While eventually bias and inefficiency exist in every org, these companies would not be competitive if they prioritized bogus metrics.

I mean, there are three serious top level AI companies, and the only thing they're competing on right now is the quality of their frontier models. Or arguably their ability to raise cash, in an extremely "buzzy" market....

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

#277

Post by notanaverageman »

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.

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

#278

Post by RMPR »

533474 wrote: post #259
pentamassiv wrote: post #105

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…

You should have licensed it under AGPL; Anthropic then would have reached you to negotiate a commercial license or contribute back to the project, since AGPL forces server-side code disclosures when deployed. Without that, they can legally use, modify, and profit from it without sharing improvements or compensating you

OP mentioned he took over an existing project. He would then have to track all the people who contributed in order to be able to relicense to AGPL. Even then, Anthropic would probably then write their own.

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

#279

Post by astrange »

dochtman wrote: post #260
astrange wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, they don’t. Selling support contracts is actually hard. GPL/AGPL preclude widespread adoption (these days) — the grandparent explicitly mentioned “permissive” licenses.

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.

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

#280

Post by Aachen »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #237
bruce511 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is of course a terrible reply to receive, I'm sorry you got that. But I also find the psychology behind this sort of reply interesting, because there's lots of factors that lead to this sort of extreme. Firstly, we don't know the age of the replier, but my guess would be someone also young, or at least immature. Telling people to kill themselves is not something adults typically do in any context.) So it suggest…

Meanwhile, here's Linus at the age of 42: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/linus-to-opensuse-devs-ki...

TLDR seems to be like "whatever moron made this is mentally disabled". Not quite the KYS that is popular with the youth (in a game played by mostly teenage boys, we kept needing to moderate and escalate ban durations for a lot of players) but not particularly great to put it mildly indeed
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