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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?

#361

Post by thrance »

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

When you could tell teens to kill thmeselves over nothing? That's what you're musing over? Get some help.

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

#363

Post by epolanski »

dash2 wrote: post #276
epolanski wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

There's definitely more than 3 companies competing for AI talent and you know that very well.

Nvidia, Apple, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Tesla, Microsoft, Mistral and dozens and dozens of well funded AI startups are just among those with more resources.

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

#364

Post by padjo »

bruce511 wrote: post #231
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,…

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…

> Telling people to kill themselves is not something adults typically do in any context.

It’s pretty typical of the alpha-nerd type who derives a ton of their self worth from superiority in some arcane area.

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

#365

Post by 9rx »

eru wrote: post #299
9rx wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eh, how is that different from going into business by yourself? Pedantically, there is unlikely to be a wage. But even if we use the term loosely, the type of scalable business described usually do not make any money until it is sold, so you are effectively forced out as soon as it is possible. A highly paid wage slave may technically be able to leave just as quickly, but in practice the golden handcuffs are often…

As opposed to 'people who briefly ran their own business'?

As opposed to "to be a business owner and have that business scale". You could have just read the earlier comments...

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

#366

Post by donatj »

I regret using the MIT License on a couple of my applications that others have picked up and monetized.

I do not regret making their source available for people to learn from and extend. I'm not even mad they're making money. I just would have liked, in hindsight, to have used a license that guaranteed me some iota of credit in the finished product. Particularly in things where I built the entire finished product - that is to say applications, not libraries.

MIT is fine and good for libraries, but full blown tools where I built the actual UI, and people aren't even extending it but are just re-hosting it and in some cases claiming they created it? I should have used something else.

I wrote a post about it that got picked up by certain types and used as an argument against open source generally. That interpretation is almost as frustrating as the situation with the licenses, and isn't what I was attempting to say at all!

I love open source, I love the MIT license. I just think it makes more sense for me to use on libraries than finished applications.

https://donatstudios.com/License-Grumbles

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39413562

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

#367

Post by Jotalea »

I've been told my code sucks and I should be ashamed of having it in my public GitHub profile.

I've been told there were too many RCE exploits on all of the software I made, but the reporter didn't specify what software has the exploits (could be anything from my personal website, my forum, my link sharing site, my fangame, to my discord bot; they didn't specify). And even though I did get attacked by spam on my own forum, I made a workaround for it and it worked.

Since then I've been making proprietary software only, but distribution is harder this way (at least for me).

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

#368

Post by kstrauser »

rewgs wrote: post #290
kstrauser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that this is also an enormous part of the reason why CA is a world tech hub. I hear other US states claiming they want to build a similar reputation. “So, you’ll pass laws giving employees ownership of their own personal projects they make on their own time?” “LOL, no!” “Alright, good luck Tupelo.”

Wait, other states claim ownership of personal projects made in their own time? How in the world is that legal?

Give you one guess which entity in that transaction wrote the laws.

Something something the idea must have come from something they saw at work, obviously.

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

#369

Post by Jotalea »

Jotalea wrote: post #367

I've been told my code sucks and I should be ashamed of having it in my public GitHub profile. I've been told there were too many RCE exploits on all of the software I made, but the reporter didn't specify what software has the exploits (could be anything from my personal website, my forum, my link sharing site, my fangame, to my discord bot; they didn't specify). And even though I did get attacked by spam on my own…

But I'm planning to return to the open source by making useful, niche, small software, and adding it to the AUR.

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

#370

Post by moses-palmer »

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…

How curious! So am I, and that is the project that I am the closest to regretting open sourcing.

I made the mistake of also implementing keyboard and mouse monitoring---you know, so I could write automated tests for the input parts!---and over the years it has turned into an endless source of feature requests, bug reports and also general questions about the Python programming language and its ecosystem.

Input events truly are horrible to provide a platform independent abstraction over, but in the end seeing people use it, make YouTube tutorials and discuss it on Stack Overflow make it worth the time spent.

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