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.
Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
341–350 of 454 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
I almost believed that was a thing, but I don't see any indication that it is. Not a bad idea IMO
Hah. Well it is now...just copy & paste the GPL's text and append that one condition.
The FSF holds the copyright to the text of the GPL, and they allow anyone to freely redistribute verbatim copies, but they don't permit just anyone to create derivatives.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#343My 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 a…
There are plenty of inconsiderate assholes in FOSS. Some communities are worse than others. Some are tolerable too.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#344[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meanwhile, here's Linus at the age of 42: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/linus-to-opensuse-devs-ki...
The world's most successful open source developer didn't converge on that communication style for no reason. I don't think I've seen a single person bring up the classism inherent in dictating gentlemanly manners. Part of what made open source unique is that people from all classes could participate, and working class people are not tuned to pick up on subtle communication the way the upper classes have been. Linus l…
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Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#346To 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 c…
Thank you for this honest reflection. A good reminder to think about priorities.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#347I 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
[A]GPL is like kryptonite to corporations. Very few will take the risk of having to open their own code if someone made a mistake in isolating the GPLed code properly, so most ban the use of GPL for their products and services.
Anthropic would have found a different library or rolled their own, rather than taking that risk. If the library was fundamental, maybe they'd go for a commercial license, but that's usually an option of last resort.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#348To 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 c…
>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.
This is a wise conclusion, that I think impacts many people. I know it does impact me. My personal way of going about it was that I was more invested into theoretical, ethical problems instead of my actual life problems that surrounded me. My tech life was vast and colorful, but my real life was barren.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#349To 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 c…
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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#350To 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 c…
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.
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.