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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?

#351

Post by Suzuran »

I made the mistake of open-sourcing something that attracted a large mob angry that an outsider had intruded upon their space. Got doxed, death threats, and my employer was also harassed. Even after I publicly abandoned and repudiated the project I still get crap about it.

I now caution everyone who talks about open-sourcing their projects to consider which groups might feel that the existence of the proposed project represents an attack against them and what threat those groups may pose when they dedicate themselves to your removal.

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

#352

Post by thrance »

stn_za wrote: post #332
thrance wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not hackers, more like mentally ill trolls that fought for the right to say racial slurs on github issues.

[flagged]

What was a better time? When injunctions to suicide were socially acceptable?

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

#353

Post by latchkey »

latexr wrote: post #287
latchkey wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're expecting them to hire you because you wrote some code they happen to depend on?

I’m unsure if you’re being serious or making a joke. If you depend on something, it is in your best interest to have it continue and remain in good shape. What better way to ensure that then to pay the salary of the creator and world’s utmost expert on the thing? As a bonus, it ensures your specific needs about the thing are addressed in a timely manner.

Making something open source has no bearing on your future employment. Certainly, it is great to have something on the resume that is used internally, but to have an _expectation_ that someone would hire you for that reason, is beyond my imagination.

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

#354

Post by friendly_chap »

giis wrote: post #321

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 c…

I can imagine that happening when the motivation is external (praise). When I write open-source it's because I have to write it out of myself.

Do I expect praise, kudos, fame, whatever? I do and that happens, I have been hired countless of times because of open-source. Even my friends (!) have been hired because of open-source stuff I wrote and they contributed to.

But the main motivation is internal - I just have to see it take shape. Like a writer who can't resist painting or a writer who can't stop writing.

Do I have regrets still? Yeah because I could have used the time for better things. But that can be said about any hobby.

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

#355

Post by [deleted] »

stn_za wrote: post #300
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,…

Sigh, good old days

[deleted]

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

#356

Post by keysdev »

_lvbh wrote: post #312
keysdev wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you see: https://t-shaped.nl/posts/synctrain-a-rethought-ios-client-f...

Thank you! This looks like exactly what I needed

Yeah most pieces are there to ditch corporate software now days.

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

#357

Post by Aurornis »

senderista wrote: post #178
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…

A project can't be monetized without getting wide adoption, and it can't get wide adoption without a permissive license that precludes monetization :(

It’s the difference between a project and a business.

They made an open project and let the community contribute to it and adopt it.

They wished it was a business, not a project. A business has support, sales, and higher expectations than the serve-yourself open source projects

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

#358

Post by cnst »

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…

> Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo. I wrote a cover letter and sent out my application. An automatic reply informed me that they might take some time to respond and that they only notify applicants if they made it to the next round. After a few weeks without an answer, I had assumed they chose other applicants.

Wait, so, if it was a friend-of-a-friend situation, why did you not try to get a referral?

I've stopped applying to the big companies long time ago precisely because I'd never hear back regardless of the match or the credentials (the only exception has been JaneStreet — they contacted me almost right away after a cold application), yet going the referral route, it's relatively easy to get an interview almost anywhere.

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

#359

Post by kccqzy »

senderista wrote: post #180

I don't understand why more projects haven't adopted the "open-source, closed-contribution" model of SQLite. Seems much more sustainable than the default model where a maintainer is expected to review every patch and respond to every issue.

Last I checked GitHub doesn't even allow you to turn off the Pull Requests feature on a repo that you do not want contributions to.

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

#360

Post by bji9jhff »

bsimpson wrote: post #238
TheTon wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I recall, GitHub popularized (maybe even invented) the pull request. That's what enabled open source to take off - being able to send patches to (or even fork) other projects with minimal friction.

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