I have regretted releasing OSS under the umbrella of employers, and will likely not do so in the future. And while I never regretted releasing OSS as such, I did often have regrets that while I know the software was better than what was currently available in the market, me being bad at marketing meant that it would still not get any use.
Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
311–320 of 454 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wanted it to work on IOS. None of those were viable. In terms of why not my own plugin, that's just pure incompetence. I don't know TypeScript that well while getting the API done only took a few days. I tried working on a plugin later on for sync but found the docs difficult to follow. In the end, it wasn't worth the effort and I've gone back to just neovim and syncthing. For IOS, I'm sideloading my own app writte…
Did you see: https://t-shaped.nl/posts/synctrain-a-rethought-ios-client-f...
Thank you! This looks like exactly what I needed
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 (…
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 is an intense person on the value safety side?
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
c) Open core model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model
which seems to be by far the most common
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#315My worst experience is to submit two decent PR that was ignored by maintainers. I had burden to support them for a month, solving merge conflicts, solving new bugs in the main branch that were merged without testing, and to adapt test system to prove my changes are solving something. And then I saw that maintainer not just ignores but closes every else PR with these words: > your contributions are too undisciplined a…
Wow, what on earth? That second link is not a good showing. I assume there must have been some out-of-GitHub interaction to provoke that kind of response.
The only out-of-GitHub interaction was as Zulip chat, where I asked maintainers to review and merge it [3], and another one to Ali, telling him my feelings about getting banned for closing my contributions, discussing further actions.
Two deleted messages on ZSF had this content:
> SPIR-V at master is still broken. I tried to help Zig. But PR never gets merged. I had to update it 3 times. It lasted for a month. I have updated all SPIR-V dependencies. You don't care about SPIR-V anyway, why I was threatened this way?
> Sorry for my contributions.
I was really disappointed when I wrote this, and I thought that nobody should see this to not harm maintainers and the project itself, so I deleted them. Then I got banned on Zulip without a reason.
I just wanted to make Zig closer to 1.0 release.
[3]: https://zsf.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/454360-compiler/to...
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.”
I bring this up constantly, even to the point of trying to figure out if US states can have "embassies" in other US states.
I was once advised to take a vacation to California every year and do all my thinking then. But I hate wasting fuel, and it'd be so much more fun to say "this little park in the middle of Detroit is actually California soil", and just walk down there every few weeks with my notepad, and ponder what problems need solving and how.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#317Never.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should have licensed it under AGPL; Anthropic then would have reached you to negotiate a commercial license or contribute back to the project, since AGPL forces server-side code disclosures when deployed. Without that, they can legally use, modify, and profit from it without sharing improvements or compensating you
what's to stop them from Recreate this library so that I can use it in my project without fear of copyright violation. in their very own claude code?
For small enough codebases, that seems like an inevitable reality, eventually.
If you have nearly limitless compute to throw at an issue and a good enough model, then it should be able to create enough test cases to cover most aspects of the codebase (iterating thousands of times until it gets it right) and then eventually write a new implementation in a new language or a slightly different tech stack that passes all of the original tests, alongside a few more hundreds of iterations of refactoring.
I give it a decade until large orgs are doing that to avoid licensing restrictions and other liabilities.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#319Not 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…
I get pretty angry by those type of people. „Open source and free*” asterisk for „until I get traction or VC money”. That’s bait and switch and riding on community good will.
The dev cannot remove the older opensource versions, so the community is always free to fork those
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
#320My worst experience is to submit two decent PR that was ignored by maintainers. I had burden to support them for a month, solving merge conflicts, solving new bugs in the main branch that were merged without testing, and to adapt test system to prove my changes are solving something. And then I saw that maintainer not just ignores but closes every else PR with these words: > your contributions are too undisciplined a…
That was quite rude of Andrew. If someone doesn't want to review a PR, then they should just ignore it IMHO.