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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?

#421

Post by GoToRO »

elric wrote: post #326
GoToRO wrote: post #323

Just 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.…

They would pay, once their product depends on your work.

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

#422

Post by johnsea »

Ygg2 wrote: post #410
johnsea wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be a bit more humble imo. An open source maintainer (author) is _not_ required to look at PRs. Besides, who wants to work with a (quote) "unreliable rightless russian troll backdoor vibecoder fake individual"? ...

> (quote) "unreliable rightless russian troll backdoor vibecoder fake individual" First off you're allowed some self deprecating humor. Second where did you pull that quote? Maintainer had a year to review the PR. It's obvious they want to solve it their way. Perhaps the maintainers wanted smaller PRs. Perhaps the maintainers got spooked by vibe coder. Still no reason to treat even an LLM that badly. I'm no saint, bu…

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24317 --> https://github.com/ivanstepanovftw (profile from 8/6/25, not sure if it was different earlier)

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

#423

Post by bruce511 »

tryauuum wrote: post #384
bruce511 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've recently told a person to kill themselves. Because I was very frustrated with the trend their product is going. For example, they rolled out a wysiwyg editor with the "lose all the text input" feature. I'm writing such harsh words when I expect 0 improvement from the company but I hope at least to make the customer support person reconsider their life choices and quit the evil company

As a data point, would you care to reveal your age?

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

#424

Post by int_19h »

bravesoul2 wrote: post #154
arjvik wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you apply through the website/job posting? I’d strongly recommend trying again and reaching out to the friend of a friend who informed you of the role and asking for a more direct intro to the hiring manager. Unfortunately, it’s really really easy to slip through the cracks as a resume, and one feels no remorse rejecting a pdf file. Even without the warm contact, some way of directly reaching the hiring manager (…

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.

To remind, that's a company working on AI for the US military.

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

#425

Post by elric »

GoToRO wrote: post #421
elric wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

They would pay, once their product depends on your work.

Would they? Their products depends on the work of thousands of FOSS contributions. And historically, the vast majority of companies haven't contributed or paid. All they've done is take. There have been numerous cases of GPL violations and other misappropriations of licenses. I don't see why a "Pay me $1000"-clause would be any different.

Was at a talk by the curl maintainer a while back, he has a stack of emails from entitled companies that expect him to work for free. It's mind boggling.

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

#426

Post by cylemons »

ozim wrote: post #376
cylemons wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dev cannot remove the older opensource versions, so the community is always free to fork those

But with this you create another bunch of people like the guy in original article. Is free fork enough or people should get paid? Does that project owner hire some of people from community, what about ones left out?

Thing is the original owner has to have fast paced development and add new features or else people would stick to the open source version. So its not just free publicity

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

#427

Post by zelphirkalt »

bravesoul2 wrote: post #157
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…

Needs a GNU GPLJ license. You can use this for commercial purposes only if you offer the copyright holder a job.

It is probably a bit late for that, as the company could simply use an earlier release, that was still under MIT license and develop it from there. They would have to maintain it of course, but if they are truly unwilling to hire, they might just do that. Nevertheless it would be a good move to move to a copyleft libre license.

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

#428

Post by rcbdev »

whacko_quacko wrote: post #322
bigiain wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does Blockchain have to do with the energy usage of Microsoft's computing centres?

Are you trying to downplay the compute required to train and run inference on these large language models by stringing together some contrived comparison to the now 'uncool' Blockchain technology? That would be absurd.

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

#429

Post by tomhow »

jart wrote: post #420
tw061023 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

The comment you're replying to was definitely a bad one, but we need you to resist the urge to respond with a personal attack. Your comment would be fine without the last sentence.

We appreciate your many positive contributions to HN, and we just ask you keep in mind that HN can only be a good place to participate if enough people make the effort to keep it that way.

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

#430

Post by ivanstepanovftw »

johnsea wrote: post #422
Ygg2 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (quote) "unreliable rightless russian troll backdoor vibecoder fake individual" First off you're allowed some self deprecating humor. Second where did you pull that quote? Maintainer had a year to review the PR. It's obvious they want to solve it their way. Perhaps the maintainers wanted smaller PRs. Perhaps the maintainers got spooked by vibe coder. Still no reason to treat even an LLM that badly. I'm no saint, bu…

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24317 --> https://github.com/ivanstepanovftw (profile from 8/6/25, not sure if it was different earlier)

I will help you with the links https://web.archive.org/web/20250624001401/https://github.co...
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