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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?

#331

Post by jart »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #237
bruce511 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The world's most successful open source developer didn't converge on that communication style for no reason. I don't think I've seen a single person bring up the classism inherent in dictating gentlemanly manners. Part of what made open source unique is that people from all classes could participate, and working class people are not tuned to pick up on subtle communication the way the upper classes have been. Linus likes to communicate in a way that leaves no ambiguity about he feels, to people of any class background, or any level of English language proficiency. The tradeoff is it offends the sensibilities of highly domesticated elites.

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

#332

Post by stn_za »

thrance wrote: post #329
stn_za wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COCs never became popular though, business types enforced them and hackers fought against and lost

Not hackers, more like mentally ill trolls that fought for the right to say racial slurs on github issues.

[flagged]

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

#333

Post by bravesoul2 »

whacko_quacko wrote: post #322
bigiain wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to be insanely dedicated to burning rainforests and boiling oceans so that people can have AI write emails that other people will use AI to summarise and never even read the summary.

You're mixing up AI and Blockchain there, bud. AI has other, much deeper problems than energy usage, but nice virtue signalling nonetheless.

AI uses a lot of energy but unlike PoW, electricity wastage isn't it's purpose.

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

#334

Post by 123pie123 »

dave_universetf wrote: post #219

I wrote MetalLB, a bare metal load-balancer for Kubernetes, because I needed one for myself. It gained some popularity because for a couple years, it was the only way to get working L4 LB outside of clouds. These days I believe a couple of the CNIs added support for external BGP peering and integration with k8s's LB machinery, but that came years later. As a result, I became network troubleshooting tech support for a…

retrospectively, could you have made some good money for your support?

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

#335

Post by 4gotunameagain »

vegancap wrote: post #325

Not quite an open-source project, but I did a massive blog post series on Microservices in Golang. It sort of became a bit of a defacto starting point for a while, it was an immense amount of work and effort. But I found my inbox flooded with people asking for advice, and honestly, writing about it all made me realise how ridiculous Microservices often are. I could tell many of the people asking me didn't really need…

How did something as popular not find its way to the internet archive ?

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

#336

Post by singpolyma3 »

kellpossible2 wrote: post #285
533474 wrote: post #259

Earlier 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?

If you feed it the library to recreate then this seems like it would necessarily be a derivative work and thus copyright infringement. Proving that they did it may be a challenge...

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

#337

Post by poszlem »

giis wrote: post #321

To be honest, I do regret it. After 20 years of working on FOSS projects, I've invested enormous amounts of time, effort, and money into these and other free/open-source initiatives. It was enjoyable initially - there's something addictive about receiving praise from strangers and unknown communities. You keep going because it feels good and you develop a sense of moral superiority. But years later, when the people c…

This is a very thoughtful post, and I sympathize with the sentiment, but I don't think it's really about "open sourcing" anything. The same could be said if you spent that time building model trains, working on a car, or engaging in any other hobby.

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

#338

Post by singpolyma3 »

rideontime wrote: post #155
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,…

And people wonder why Codes of Conduct became popular...

Your daily reminder that a code of conduct is only as valuable as the moderation team behind it.

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

#339

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

hosh wrote: post #112
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…

Interesting, considering that Anthropic spends a lot of resourced to build ethics checks into their AI. I wonder if this hiring process was ever put through its own ethics check.

There's no ethical principle which requires them to hire somebody if they use OSS from that person. Maybe they missed out on a good hire, c'est la vie.

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

#340

Post by noname120 »

zero_shift wrote: post #328
epolanski wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While eventually bias and inefficiency exist in every org, these companies would not be competitive if they prioritized bogus metrics.

_Are_ they competitive? So far they all seem to be struggling with sustainable profit. Raising money in a gold rush is easy mode. Surviving the market correction will be the hard part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
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