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.
Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
161–170 of 454 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t this the thing AI is going to claim to solve? A project exists, a user writes a feature request, the AI codes up the changes, pushes a new release, and everyone is happy. That’s the sales pitch. The big issue with this, even if it works perfectly every time, is that there is no one at the core of the project with some vision and taste, who is willing to say “no” to bad ideas or things outside the scope of the p…
> The big issue with this, even if it works perfectly every time, is that there is no one at the core of the project with some vision and taste, who is willing to say “no” to bad ideas or things outside the scope of the project. Why would any user ever care about the scope of the project or how you feel about their ideas? If they want your open source software to also play MP3s and read their email they'll just ask a…
Hopefully you get how this is analogous.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#163I 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…
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#164About 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 wasn't aware that it had started to take off.
The man page now has someone else's name on it as author. I don't really regret publishing it but I wish I had put a copyright notice and license on it.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#165We went full in and not only open sourced the firmware of our air quality monitors but made it completely open source hardware, this means it includes the electronic schematics, enclosure files etc. [1] I believe it was the single most important decision we took as a company and probably also contributed to a large part to the growth and success we are having now. It enables us to build a really strong community, and…
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#166Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stallman’s open source movement do you want to give RMS a heart attack? RMS founded the Free Software movement to protect the users of software. 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 ignor…
The GPL he wrote is the basis of the reciprocity agreement that drove the open source movement, it is the legal mechanism that prevents commercial actors from taking over shared works, and locking other creators out of continued participation in their collective creations. Stallman explicitly warned about working on proprietary software for an employer: > “If I sign a nondisclosure agreement to work on a proprietary…
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
The closest thing I could find was this:
> Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.
So were users or "creators" his concern? I don't remember him ever giving too much of a shit about the happiness of creators, I wouldn't have approved. I don't (particularly) care about programmer's problems.
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edit:
I can't find the quote "If I sign a nondisclosure agreement to work on a proprietary program" on the entire internet.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Needs a GNU GPLJ license. You can use this for commercial purposes only if you offer the copyright holder a job.
I almost believed that was a thing, but I don't see any indication that it is. Not a bad idea IMO
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#169In terms of software we usually used Apache 2.0, LGPL, and GPL licenses.
Anecdotes:
1. FOSS e-Commerce tax module for merchant account gateway was resold as commercial software to several local businesses by a "startup". Didn't care until years later when we started getting spammed with support requests given the original email was in the source, and the "startup" had moved on to other ventures.
2. Wrote industrial drivers for integrated manufactured equipment, and due to remote locations it was important service people could modify/rebuild the open code as needed. We tracked prototype product GPS telemetry to a Singapore University campus, and saw a copy of the GUI at a trade show the following year. No more FOSS in commercial releases.
3. Built generic 3D printing hardware for our local club activities, and within a few months it was a product on Aliexpress. The problem was it was the Beta firmware design, and again people that paid for something that was supposed to be free get irate about support.
4. Built a small OS distro for Ham radio, EE, ROS, CNC, and 3D printing. Of the 8000 users only 2 people provided any sort of participation in maintaining the build. Also, many people were paranoid there was some sort of nefarious purpose even when meeting them in real life. “Free as in free beer” tends to make people suspicious in real life.
5. Tried to expand existing FOSS software, but get ghosted by the community when trying to learn about their code (stare into the void of ambiguous documentation.) Most FOSS communities are great, but some people just don't want to know about you or your silly problems. Better off with your own project fork version specific to a use-case, and share under a similar hands-off library support model.
6. Built custom FOSS IT infrastructure, and had publishers switch licenses years later. Makes people look like fools when a certain now well known vendor cold-call solicits a $8k support fee for something they probably broke on purpose 2-weeks prior. Re-wrote it in 3 weeks, and never exposed core systems to a “trust me bro” crowd again.
7. Took a few foundation courses to clear up the WTF deprecated vestigial garbage moments in the kernel source. Realized the value proposition is just not worth the perpetual Beta and political hassles. Started writing my own toy kernel that is just as odd as the hardware it is meant to run on, as traditional architecture problems just do not handle parallelism cleanly. Don’t ask, seriously… lol
8. Tried financial & bug support for other small FOSS projects we think are cool, but around 60% of the time projects are abandoned/EOL within 2 years. Building a user base around that is impossible.
I am sure there are some folks that fair much better, but in general most FOSS problems I saw are economic and or political… from a technical perspective Open source has proven more reliable than most commercial options.
Thus, prefer FOSS projects that serve your specific needs first, write something that fits your own use-case if you must, and expect zero community support unless your team lucks out. YMMV =3
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Um not down voting you, but your argument has some flaws. Firstly your appeal to authority , and then using Steve Ballmer as your authority is perhaps not the best way to start. Secondly you say that "no professional programmer" - but the statement is false. For starters it's a sweeping generalization which is trivial to show is untrue for at least 1 programmer. Thirdly the existence of Open Source alternatuve does n…
Quoting Steve Ballmer doesn't mean that the person is worshipping Steve Ballmer as a god. It just means that another person expressed a similar opinion.
Instead of getting people to try and come up with an argument that wasn't made, the argument could have just been made. But I'm sure it is a very bad argument, or else there wouldn't be that embarrassment to try.