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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?

#231

Post by bruce511 »

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 is of course a terrible reply to receive, I'm sorry you got that.

But I also find the psychology behind this sort of reply interesting, because there's lots of factors that lead to this sort of extreme.

Firstly, we don't know the age of the replier, but my guess would be someone also young, or at least immature. Telling people to kill themselves is not something adults typically do in any context.)

So it suggests another junior, desperate to prove their own standing, and needing to compete against others rather than collaborate. I've seen this kind of response in one adult (abusive to other forum members) but he clearly had quite severe mental health issues (and the user was banned.) In youngsters it is usually extinguished with firm moderator guidance.

With adult responders, frustration and tedium play a role. Personally I'm more generous with replies in the morning than the evening. At times I almost "fake" patience (when I'm getting impatient) with people who are simply not thinking, and who aren't listening.

Overall it is very imbalanced. The asker is asking 1 question. The replier may answer tens or hundreds in a day. So it's hard to answer each one as if it's original, as if it matters, as if you've not heard it a million times before (especially if it's right there in the FAQ.)

Part of answering well, and the quality of any forum, is in participants answering well, even if the question is trivial.

We all were newbies once. Asking stupid questions is how we grew from there. Answering stupid questions is how we pay it forward.

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

#232

Post by nothrabannosir »

pxc wrote: post #201
kevindamm wrote: post #161

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

It could never be a GNU license because it violates freedom 0 as outlined by the FSF: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

I guess with a benign modification it does work: it’s just dual licensed (a)gpl and commercial license, the latter available when offered a job. The former always available but of course they’d have to release their entire stack’s source, which Anthropic almost certainly wouldn’t want to do. That’s not OP’s fault though and the license stands as pure (a)gpl.

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

#233

Post by bsimpson »

socalgal2 wrote: post #206
ryandrake wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see someone on HN talking about their moonlighting or side/hobby project, I get chills and think to myself "Boy, I hope they don't work for $BIGCO, because in all likelihood their existing employer claims IP ownership over that work, and if they ever try to do anything substantial with it, they're going to have corporate lawyers on their case." I've had experience with a similar "committee" (probably same…

Some companies are far more open than others. Google has tons of open source projects both through Google and via personal projects. Apple on the otherhand mostly forbids personal projects period, or so I've been told.

I haven't open sourced anything in a while, but at Google it's historically been pretty easy so long as you let Google put itself as the copyright holder and aren't in any legal minefields (e.g. emulators). You can actually look up the Google Open Source docs even if you don't work there.

That's why so many repos say "Not an official Google product." That's the boilerplate of someone's side project that got open sourced, but Google wanted to claim copyright.

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

#234

Post by astrange »

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

Small claims is cheaper than that and the other side often isn't allowed to use lawyers.

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

#235

Post by bsimpson »

OnionBlender wrote: post #184

Obviously not me, but I remember John Carmack regretting releasing Doom and Quake under GPL instead of BSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#:~:text=The%20sou...

Look into toybox. It's a tiny reimplementation of GNU coreutils that ships in Android.

The author was on the core team for another project in that space (I think busybox). He saw first hand how copyleft sounds good but ends up being lots of friction with no practical benefit, and vowed to public domain all his projects after that. BSD0 is him giving a name to a public domain grant so OSS people could recognize it.

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

#236

Post by bruce511 »

broken_broken_ wrote: post #228

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.

Obviously I can't change how it made you feel, and as such it was a crappy reply to receive, but on one level at least it's a genuine question that projects should have an answer for.

It kinda matters if you build something as a proof of concept, or you build it to exercise some new technique, or you build it to improve the state of the art, or you build it as the foundation for a product etc.

You wrote it "for fun". That's an excellent reason to write something. I can appreciate your effort in that context. It's going to have rough edges etc. And when it's not fun anymore you move on.

Someone else might write the same thing, but for a different reason. Maybe they want a "better Kotlin compiler". They intend to make it perfect, build a product around it and so on. This sort of project encourages a different level of scrutiny than something fun.

So giving context to a project helps attract the right kind of attention. And more importantly the right kind of other-peoples-time.

But yeah, asking like that is not terribly polite.

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

#237

Post by aaronbrethorst »

bruce511 wrote: post #231
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 is of course a terrible reply to receive, I'm sorry you got that. But I also find the psychology behind this sort of reply interesting, because there's lots of factors that lead to this sort of extreme. Firstly, we don't know the age of the replier, but my guess would be someone also young, or at least immature. Telling people to kill themselves is not something adults typically do in any context.) So it suggest…

Meanwhile, here's Linus at the age of 42: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/linus-to-opensuse-devs-ki...

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

#238

Post by bsimpson »

TheTon wrote: post #136
dmoy wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many other projects on Google Code became part of a news cycle because people misinterpreted them as being written or endorsed by Google? Was that part of why Google Code was shut down? I don't remember the exact details, and I was way in the backend (Kythe), not the frontend part of it. But my extremely hazy recollection is it probably had more to do with the gwt deprecation than anything else. There was headc…

Wow, thanks for the insight. It's sort of crazy to think about how big GitHub has become, and how much Microsoft paid for it, but of course it wasn't the first product in the space at all. Right time, right place, right features, I guess, and maybe Google Code was missing a bit of each of those.

As I recall, GitHub popularized (maybe even invented) the pull request. That's what enabled open source to take off - being able to send patches to (or even fork) other projects with minimal friction.

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

#239

Post by daxhuiberts »

broken_broken_ wrote: post #228

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.

I think this might be an appropriate response to that question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auC0s6km21E

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

#240

Post by bigstrat2003 »

astrange wrote: post #224
seabass-labrax wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

> if you follow the handbook it still recommends setting up computers like individual special snowflakes instead of properly managed cattle.

Which is a perfectly legitimate opinion to hold. "Cattle, not pets" is an opinion about best practices, not a religious dogma where those who don't agree must be cast out of the community.

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