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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?

#381

Post by doawoo »

epolanski wrote: post #273
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…

Hey! I used your plugin!! It actually paid few bills in my case! Regards.

<3 Glad it was helpful!

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

#383

Post by DonHopkins »

lproven wrote: post #306
bsimpson wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rob Landley, and the original Busybox author was Bruce Perens, who with Eric Raymond co-popularised Christine Peterson's new term "open source". https://lwn.net/Articles/202120/

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

#384

Post by tryauuum »

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…

I've recently told a person to kill themselves. Because I was very frustrated with the trend their product is going. For example, they rolled out a wysiwyg editor with the "lose all the text input" feature.

I'm writing such harsh words when I expect 0 improvement from the company but I hope at least to make the customer support person reconsider their life choices and quit the evil company

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

#385

Post by DonHopkins »

em-bee wrote: post #87
riazrizvi wrote: post #73

The purpose of Stallman’s open source movement was to redistribute power back into the hands of creators who were getting walled out of anything but proprietary work for an employer. If they were fired, they had nothing to show for years of work except a reference, since their deep expertise was essentially meaningless. (An experience I’m sure almost everyone here is familiar with, since we’ve all spent some years on…

Stallman’s open source movement do you want to give RMS a heart attack? RMS founded the Free Software movement to protect the users of software. to redistribute power back into the hands of creators who were getting walled out of anything but proprietary work for an employer. If they were fired, they had nothing to show for years of work except a reference, since their deep expertise was essentially meaningless ignor…

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

#386

Post by hosh »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #339
hosh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are ethical principles like that, but they just may not be in our mainstream corporate or open source software culture.

The permaculture ethical principle of “fair share” would apply here, if a group were using those.

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

#388

Post by johnsea »

ivanstepanovftw wrote: post #296

My 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…

You should be a bit more humble imo. An open source maintainer (author) is _not_ required to look at PRs. Besides, who wants to work with a (quote) "unreliable rightless russian troll backdoor vibecoder fake individual"? ...

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

#389

Post by singpolyma3 »

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 :(

If this were true no nonfree software would ever make money
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