Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something? • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by bruce511 » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 5:18 AM UTC

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.

As it stands right now, if the code was under a GPL license, nothing stops them paying the author to get it under another license.[1]

Sure, they could offer a job as payment for said license, or just pay cash.

This approach would be "necessary" (for some definition of necessary) for GPL code, but isn't necessary for MIT code.

[1] this assumes there's 1 (or nearly 1) copyright owner. If there are multiple contributors, and no CUA in place, this approach is generally not possible.

Personally, and different people have strong feelings on this both ways, with GPL code I'd get contributors to sign a CUA. It keeps the door open for commercial opportunities like this, especially if the code is "mostly yours".

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

#222

Post by carlosjobim » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 5:18 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #170

carlosjobim wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't add color to your argument if you've failed to add an argument. If all you've typed is an appeal to authority, you're trying to trick people into making your argument for you by trying to guess what Ballmer meant and why he thought that. 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 ther…

Nobody has appealed to authority. Quoting a person is not appealing to authority. And why would anybody be embarrassed about anything here?

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

#223

Post by siva7 » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 5:24 AM UTC

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…

I would rather assume your application didn't reach anyone in the team but got filtered out by some broken process below.

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

#224

Post by astrange » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 5:28 AM UTC

seabass-labrax wrote: post #197

grepfru_it wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FreeBSD does seem better directed than it used to be, but if you follow the handbook it still recommends setting up computers like individual special snowflakes instead of properly managed cattle.

Like, if your installation has useful services running on it, it should not also have a customized kernel and it probably shouldn't have a C compiler installed at all. What it should have is backups and a way to stage/test/revert config changes instead of just making them on prod. It… does not do this.

IME if you bring this up you'll just get a hundred complaints from people saying "I built a system to do this out of poudriere and duct tape so it's fine". I guess because the people who know about declarative programming all use Docker.

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

#225

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 5:32 AM UTC

EE84M3i wrote: post #179

bravesoul2 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does being "intense" on the safety side mean? High risk taking with AI safety or low?

[deleted]

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

#226

Post by astrange » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 5:34 AM UTC

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…

> Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.

There's plenty of companies that offer stock compensation. You may have to move to work for them, of course.

That said, the flat hourly fee may be a better deal. If you take a % of the profits, those profits may be negative!

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

#227

Post by astrange » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 5:35 AM UTC

senderista wrote: post #178

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…

A project can't be monetized without getting wide adoption, and it can't get wide adoption without a permissive license that precludes monetization :(

There's two models that solve this.

a) sell support contracts

b) have contributors sign copyright agreements, license the project as GPL/AGPL, and then sell commercial licenses for people who can't use that

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

#228

Post by broken_broken_ » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 5:36 AM UTC

I wrote a toy Kotlin compiler, for fun. Then one day a Jetbrains employee opens an issue which only says: “Why? Just why?”. Maybe it’s the language barrier… but I did not find that particularly polite.

On the other hand I open sourced my blog and received lots of small contributions to fix typos or such which were nice.

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

#229

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 5:41 AM UTC

doawoo wrote: post #42

Yup. Long long (2016 ish) ago I released an Unreal Engine 4 plugin that let people embed chromium embedded framework views into the engine via textures, so you could make fancy HUDs or whatever. Epic Games was kind enough to give me a developer grant for open sourcing and making it, cool as hell for a college student at the time, helped pay my classes. The number of angry game devs who basically wanted me to solve al…

[deleted]

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

#230

Post by astrange » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 5:44 AM UTC

plorkyeran wrote: post #207

TheTon wrote: post #129

No regrets here, but I did use Google Code a fair bit prior to GitHub and I had an experience that made me think maybe Google regretted that product in some ways. Around 2005-6 I wrote a Mac OS X client for Xbox Live. The idea was I wanted notifications on my computer when my friends came online and started to play certain games, so I could turn on my Xbox and join them. This is a feature of the Xbox mobile app today…

The officially given reason for shutting down Google Code was that it was never intended to be a product and was just a community service thing that they did because SourceForge had ceased to be a reasonable place to host open source projects. Once a bunch of other forges popped up (including but not limited to Github) there was no longer any real need for it. I thought it sounded pretty plausible for that era of Goo…

I knew someone who worked on it at the time, and he was also convinced they could use it to force people to use the super-slow feature-lacking Mercurial, and was personally hurt that everyone wanted to use git instead because it let you rebase things.