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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?

#431

Post by lproven »

DonHopkins wrote: post #383
lproven wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rob Landley, and the original Busybox author was Bruce Perens, who with Eric Raymond co-popularised Christine Peterson's new term "open source". https://lwn.net/Articles/202120/

[dead]

> Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek

Who is of course a frequent HN poster, one of the very top rated on the site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek

I remain strongly suspicious that this column of his is in fact a long and convoluted troll:

https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

That got about 2.5K upvotes here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063

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

#432

Post by ivanstepanovftw »

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…

Not a humor for me. I have lost myself. I have removed this line from my bio because it causes bad associations to me with this journey of finding myself.

As for the author of the one-year-old PR, he was surprised:

- https://t.me/ziglang_en/140663

- https://t.me/ziglang_en/140664

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

#433

Post by me-vs-cat »

Sloowms wrote: post #258
dn3500 wrote: post #164

In 1981 I wrote a tool that is still in use today. You can install the package on most major linux distros. This was before we paid much attention to software copyright, and I simply published it with my name on it and no license. About six months later someone took my code, removed my name from it, made some small changes that didn't change its behavior at all, and re-published it. By that time I had moved on and wa…

It's probably hard to prove with something from 1981 but no license or copyright doesn't mean the source is open for taking. It basically means you just haven't set a license and could do that at any time, rugpulling the code from anyone who uses it. This is why projects like Fedora and Debian make sure everything they ship has a license.

> ...with something from 1981 but no license or copyright doesn't mean the source is open for taking.

Are you sure? That's before the US joined the Berne Convention, and also not long after the Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980.

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

#434

Post by jart »

tomhow wrote: post #429
jart wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Sure thing Tom! Appreciate your work too!

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

#435

Post by tomhow »

jart wrote: post #434
tomhow wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure thing Tom! Appreciate your work too!

Many thanks!

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

#436

Post by dongking2 »

I'm new to Hacker News and just starting to explore open source myself. I haven't had the chance to open source anything yet, but reading everyone's experiences—both positive and negative—gives me a lot to think about. Looking forward to learning more from this community!

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

#437

Post by sharmi »

timClicks wrote: post #195
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 reminds me of when I provided some impressions of Erlang as a newcomer to their mailing list. One of my suggestions was that they include hash tables, rather than rely on records (linked lists with named key). Got flamed as ignorant, and I've never emailed that mailing list again. A while later, they ended up adding hash tables to the language.

[dead]

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

#438

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

dangus wrote: post #160
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…

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…

>The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.

Another way: marry someone rich. Understandable that it did not occur to you or most people here, because most here are likely to be the XY chromosomal variety.

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

#439

Post by epolanski »

queenkjuul wrote: post #412
epolanski wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple Tesla and Microsoft arguably really don't count. Microsoft is selling shovels. Tesla is, well, Tesla. Apple is not competing on frontier models, far as i can tell

Apple has 400 open positions for AI scientists, and more than 4000 people are estimated to work on core AI tools (Apple Intelligence, etc).

Microsoft is itself working on both building AI hardware and models (such as Phi).

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

#440

Post by tryauuum »

bruce511 wrote: post #423
tryauuum wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

31-36
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