371–380 of 454 posts
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If they're not complying with your license terms, sue them. If they are then I guess you missed the boat on money.
Taking that all the way to court would be like $10,000, right? Big companies will sue. For individuals it's a barrier to entry
Not 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…
How did something as popular not find its way to the internet archive ?
Got death threats because I wasn't prioritizing stuff people were requesting, said nah I'm done
I don’t regret open-sourcing this project but god as your project becomes popular bad apples start joining and ruining the party for everyone. Fortunately it’s only a tiny minority, but it’s what stays the most on your mind.
Sometimes, a project or an idea is bigger than just a single human or company. So keeping everything only for ourselves is a very narrow strategy.
By openly sharing the knowledge, we can pass the sparks to future generations. Including future versions of ourselves after we die and get reincarnated.
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…
The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale. I can see why people have these fantasies. Huge businesses have been built on open source code bases. Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee. The place where I disagree with your take is that commercialization and ope…
‘Business owner’ in the sense of owning stock, sure.
Save 10–20% of your income. Invest it in index funds (we can argue about which particular indices). Work for a few decades. Retire wealthy.
Then bequeath that wealth to your heirs when you die, giving them a leg up on this whole process.
> Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.
The employer takes the risk that the software will have no benefit at all. We get paid no matter what. I like that trade. I’ll invest in a diversified market index rather than my single program, thank you very much.
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I get pretty angry by those type of people. „Open source and free*” asterisk for „until I get traction or VC money”. That’s bait and switch and riding on community good will.
The dev cannot remove the older opensource versions, so the community is always free to fork those
Is free fork enough or people should get paid? Does that project owner hire some of people from community, what about ones left out?
Obviously not me, but I remember John Carmack regretting releasing Doom and Quake under GPL instead of BSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#:~:text=The%20sou...
Look into toybox. It's a tiny reimplementation of GNU coreutils that ships in Android. The author was on the core team for another project in that space (I think busybox). He saw first hand how copyleft sounds good but ends up being lots of friction with no practical benefit, and vowed to public domain all his projects after that. BSD0 is him giving a name to a public domain grant so OSS people could recognize it.
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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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Anthropic has a tough alignment interview. Like I aced the coding screener but got rejected after a chat about values. I think they want intense people on the value/safety side as well as the chops.
What is an intense person on the value safety side?
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're expecting them to hire you because you wrote some code they happen to depend on?