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
Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
321–330 of 454 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does being "intense" on the safety side mean? High risk taking with AI safety or low?
You need to be insanely dedicated to burning rainforests and boiling oceans so that people can have AI write emails that other people will use AI to summarise and never even read the summary.
You're mixing up AI and Blockchain there, bud. AI has other, much deeper problems than energy usage, but nice virtue signalling nonetheless.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#323Just add to the license "if you are a megacorp you owe us $1000+ per year". I don't understand why it's so hard.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#324The 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.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#325Not 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
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#326Just add to the license "if you are a megacorp you owe us $1000+ per year". I don't understand why it's so hard.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#327I 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.
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".…
>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.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#328Earlier 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.
_Are_ they competitive? So far they all seem to be struggling with sustainable profit.
Raising money in a gold rush is easy mode. Surviving the market correction will be the hard part.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
And people wonder why Codes of Conduct became popular...
COCs never became popular though, business types enforced them and hackers fought against and lost
Not hackers, more like mentally ill trolls that fought for the right to say racial slurs on github issues.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#330Not 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 t…
I am starting to threat this kind of people like cosmic background radiation noise.