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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?

#191
post #81
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, you gave me bad flashbacks of the same committee. I tried to re-license a previously-released project (like from GPL to MIT or similar) and they wouldn't budge. I had written all the code. In the end, I decided that them suing (or firing) me to assert their ownership of $VALUELESS_PROJECT, so they could then license it back, was ridiculously unlikely, said fuck it, and did it. And I was right.

the problem isn't your risk, the problem is the risk of the users of the project. if the code is owned by the company, your re-licensing isn't legal, and that could put other companies using it at risk.

Right, but, they never owned it, and would never attempt to assert that. So in hindsight (and similar to GP) compliance was a worse and more frustrating option than simply never mentioning things.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost believed that was a thing, but I don't see any indication that it is. Not a bad idea IMO

Hah. Well it is now...just copy & paste the GPL's text and append that one condition.

> Hah. Well it is now...just copy & paste the GPL's text and append that one condition.

Section 7 of the GPL (version 3) explicitly gives the user the right to remove that additional condition. So if you want it to be effective, you will at the least need to remove section 7 from your copied GPL. Then, you'll need to remove the preamble and instructions to avoid the Free Software Foundation's ire (they're being generous in allowing you to modify the license test at all).

Ultimately, it goes against the spirit of the GPL so much (and against the point of FOSS in general) that it would be entirely unjustifiable to use the GPL as the foundation for such a proprietary, source-available licence.

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

#193
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,…

Oh wow old war wounds from teenage days opened up. My friend kept locking himself out of root and would be forced to single user the system to recover. This was difficult for many reasons, including remote hands costing up to and including $50 per call. I decided to look into why su would only work with root. Found a very simple check that I thought was unreasonable. Made my first patch and proudly posted to the Free…

God that is the absolute worst. Those type of examples make my blood boil. Unfortunately, it happens all too often in life, especially in business.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

+1. You can put together a DMCA claim in... maybe five minutes? It's extremely straightforward and doesn't require you to do anything beyond identify the infringing work, identify what work of yours it infringes upon, and affirm that it's not authorized.

Here's a template: https://library.georgetown.edu/copyright/dmca-takedown

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

#195
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.

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, you…

People, professionals, aren’t so stationary. You’re saying that this line on the asymptote is the threshold where incentives die. But the old axes need to be adjusted for new broader possibility. As long as professionals stay ahead of non-professionals by riding the same tools, to keep their position on the boundary of expertise, they will be in demand. Better to do that by not sharing how as much (source code), but…

People, professionals, aren't so stationary.

You are right, they will do something, and that something will become violent when the rule of order breaks down as a result of these basic underlying aspects.

People aren't static, but neither are they so dynamic that they can learn exponentially, expertise which took education and years to learn cannot compete with free, and lets remember people age and die, and expertise is only gained by doing the job the first rung on that experience ladder. The nature of the asymptote that people fail to realize is, the asymptote isn't at its given value when you see the whole, it trails off as it approaches certain points exponentially. Sometimes to infinity.

You can't compete with slavery, and in the case of AI, you have a digital facsimile of a person that is a slave being used by people that don't have that knowledge. It may be able to go on just long enough that there won't be any experts left by the time everything starts breaking down (which happens frighteningly quickly, typically within 10 years).

There is a train, its on tracks and those tracks go over a cliff, but that cliff is around the bend, and no one knows someone's switched the route to over that cliff, they didn't notice. The conductor keeps feeding the fuel, full steam ahead, and what happens with mass is you have inertia and between the end of the tracks and the rocky shore below? Trains don't stop on a dime.

Its an asymptote, and the nature of cascading failures is that by the time the average person realizes you have a problem, there isn't anything you can do to fix it, that is the difference between average and intelligent, and likewise the average person can't avoid the outcome because the lag and the time to react don't provide a window to change it; its already passed, its hysteresis, and its a bitch.

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

#197
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,…

Oh wow old war wounds from teenage days opened up. My friend kept locking himself out of root and would be forced to single user the system to recover. This was difficult for many reasons, including remote hands costing up to and including $50 per call. I decided to look into why su would only work with root. Found a very simple check that I thought was unreasonable. Made my first patch and proudly posted to the Free…

You still hold the copyright to your patch, and the governance of FreeBSD is so much better now. I know a former FreeBSD core team member who I'm sure would love to see you get finally credit for your work :)

I'd be more than happy to put you in touch - email address in my profile if you're interested.

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

#198
post #146

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…

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 (…

>As an aside, does anyone know why the AI labs have such bad recruiters?

They're using their own slop generator to handle recruitment.

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

#199

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.

[deleted]

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

#200
I don't have any super popular repos but I do have a few with 500 to 1500 stars and while not necassarily regret, I don't think I've ever gotten a single pull request that I could just acccept as is.

Even though the README links to live tests (browser JS libs), the person submitting the PR rarely includes tests so that's one issue. Sure I can say "I'll be happy to accept this if you could please add some tests?" but then that leads to the 2nd issue. PRs are rarely quality PRs and if I want to add the feature I end up having to re-write whatever they were trying to add from scratch.

I know people are claiming LLMs will make things worse for many projects but an LLM can likely at least read what's there and try to make things that follow the conventions?

I also know I'm under no obligation to accept any PRs. It's not that easy to say no for me, depending on the ask.

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