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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?

#71

Post by kstrauser »

lrvick wrote: post #45
greyface- wrote: post #15

I tried to open source a weekend personal project while at $BIGCO via their "Invention Assignment Review Committee". It turned into a minor bureaucratic nightmare and I was ultimately never given the OK to release it, or any clarity over whether my employer was choosing to assert an IP ownership interest in it. In retrospect, I wish I had never notified them of its existence, and released it under a pseudonym instead…

In California you can just open source it and do not need permission as long as you did it on personal time on personal hardware without referencing proprietary IP. Sure, a company could not like you doing that and find a reason to fire you, but they have no valid legal recourse and you may even be able to sue them for wrongful termination. We are one of the only states that prevents employers from having ownership o…

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.”

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

#72

Post by kstrauser »

enobrev wrote: post #63
lrvick wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tell them to fork it. Done. No need to take any grief you do not want.

Probably a bit rude, but maybe we can all agree to accept "fork off" as an acceptable, concise, and descriptive answer to unwanted requests.

“Go fork yourself.”

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

#73

Post by riazrizvi »

The purpose of Stallman’s open source movement was to redistribute power back into the hands of creators who were getting walled out of anything but proprietary work for an employer. If they were fired, they had nothing to show for years of work except a reference, since their deep expertise was essentially meaningless. (An experience I’m sure almost everyone here is familiar with, since we’ve all spent some years on proprietary systems).

Now, with LLMs, exposing your source code essentially hands over a large chunk of your hard won expertise for free to whoever wants to use it. That old model of 100% open source is broken, to my mind.

The new approach I think should be open source stubs with demos of what is capable with your additional proprietary piece.

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

#74

Post by kstrauser »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #34
phkahler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, that sounds like more hassle than it’s worth. It should be free to file a DMCA claim with Apple, though, and get it yanked from the App Store.

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

#75

Post by teekert »

riazrizvi wrote: post #73

The purpose of Stallman’s open source movement was to redistribute power back into the hands of creators who were getting walled out of anything but proprietary work for an employer. If they were fired, they had nothing to show for years of work except a reference, since their deep expertise was essentially meaningless. (An experience I’m sure almost everyone here is familiar with, since we’ve all spent some years on…

So it should be easy to reuse your open source code, but not too easy?

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

#76

Post by riazrizvi »

teekert wrote: post #75
riazrizvi wrote: post #73

The purpose of Stallman’s open source movement was to redistribute power back into the hands of creators who were getting walled out of anything but proprietary work for an employer. If they were fired, they had nothing to show for years of work except a reference, since their deep expertise was essentially meaningless. (An experience I’m sure almost everyone here is familiar with, since we’ve all spent some years on…

So it should be easy to reuse your open source code, but not too easy?

A ‘freemium source’ model, where you’re advertising possibility and promoting human-human partnership.

Industry practices that over commoditize human talent are bad IMO.

Our whole industry needs to bend its collective mind to maintaining economic participation. We’ve possibly put too much of a strain on society with LLMs. Especially as more and more people cotton on to what other services they no longer need, as models get better and better. We can’t survive as a species if too much of our lives are based on self-gratification, we have to maintain the drivers that make us interact and learn to get along.

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

#77

Post by trod1234 »

josephcsible wrote: post #6
_lvbh wrote: post #5

I regret open sourcing my reverse engineering of Obsidian Sync. I did it mostly for personal use but thought it might be useful for others. After a bit of cat and mouse, they fixed all the "vulnerabilities" that let you change the sync and publish endpoints and now I'm still stuck using a very outdated version. I recently found another way to get it working on IOS again but definitely not publishing it.

Why do they consider it a "vulnerability" that you can change configuration of software running on your own computer? I've heard a lot of good things about Obsidian before, but hearing that basically burns it all up and means I'm going to strongly recommend nobody buy anything from them anymore.

They believe that through licensing ultimatums you can give that ownership right up, and oligopoly and government's have agreed.

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

#78

Post by dasil003 »

carefulfungi wrote: post #28
sshine wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This worked for me until iCloud started cache clearing all my files aggressively so my vault would take ten minutes to open on iPhone. Every few days. When I tried to copy my vault off iCloud, the copy failed and two years of notes were permanently lost. I’m never putting anything of value in iCloud again.

Flashbacks to the time I copied iCloud pointers/placeholders thinking I was actually copying files with actual data. Oh well, who needed those few years of documents anyway.

Funny how Steve Jobs famously derided Dropbox as "a feature not a product" and yet even after trying for decades Apple can't get that feature right.

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

#79

Post by trod1234 »

riazrizvi wrote: post #73

The purpose of Stallman’s open source movement was to redistribute power back into the hands of creators who were getting walled out of anything but proprietary work for an employer. If they were fired, they had nothing to show for years of work except a reference, since their deep expertise was essentially meaningless. (An experience I’m sure almost everyone here is familiar with, since we’ve all spent some years on…

> The new approach

That won't work. The breaking of that model is far more widespread than one thinks because of how it was broken.

The breaking of the model breaks underlying models all the way down to the basis for economic distribution of labor.

Its a phase change where labor and expertise are free, without restriction and the people with that expertise do not receive economic benefit for it anymore. In short, your demand curves goes to 0 in that area. There may be a great need for something, but if the demand is 0 no one will fulfill that need. People aren't slaves. Many people conflate demand with need, Hayek in his economics in one book cover the distinction. TL;DR demand is the group of people where there is a point at which two parties are both willing to exchange something for something. Need is where no such crossection between the S/D curve in exchange can occur for the two parties involved. One is much smaller than the other, and at 0, it doesn't happen or you only get the efforts of slaves.

The trend is inevitably towards stalling the economic cycle, where such experts simply do not create such things, they do not share, the ones that could either abandon that expertise or they withdraw keeping it to themselves.

The vast majority of all action though is done for economic benefit, and when that's no longer the case people don't do it. People aren't slaves.

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

#80

Post by zaggle »

_lvbh wrote: post #5

I regret open sourcing my reverse engineering of Obsidian Sync. I did it mostly for personal use but thought it might be useful for others. After a bit of cat and mouse, they fixed all the "vulnerabilities" that let you change the sync and publish endpoints and now I'm still stuck using a very outdated version. I recently found another way to get it working on IOS again but definitely not publishing it.

Why not create your own plugin? Or use Syncthing, Git, LiveSync, Remotely Save, etc...
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