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Publishing your work increases your luck

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Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#121

Post by nicbou »

aschmelyun wrote: post #110
socialcommenter wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit? I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.

> any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit I would say that now, more than ever, this means you should be collecting and sharing what you create. Not on large social media platforms either, on websites that you own and (ideally) host yourself. Start a blog, host your own instance of Gitea, build a platform for your videos. Spread what you create and activity participate in t…

How do you contend with the fact that AI summaries are now halving traffic to people's websites and redirecting it to Google properties? Publishing in 2025 feels like merely feeding two or three megacorps.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#122

Post by jimnotgym »

MasterScrat wrote: post #87
didip wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Word by word. Some of my OSS projects got popular accidentally and oh boy… pain in the butt for real. And for little benefits to myself. Hitting HN front page or r/programming was nice for my ego. But that’s about it.

Exactly - best case scenario is Reddit/HN front page with a cool project you enjoyed working on, have some nice conversations there, reach a few 100s stars which look good on your CV, and that’s it. If you expect more long term support you better be paying me for my time.

Maybe that is the answer. Put a note in your readme setting out your terms.

1) If you want to send a PR we charge $1000 to review them. This is no guarantee that we will merge. We will quote any further costs needed after a review.

2) Feature requests should be accompanied by a $250 quotation fee. Then we will scope and quote what is required to do your feature. If your feature would compromise the project, or is impractical a started we retain the right to refuse to quote or suggest more work is required. The $250 fee is non returnable.

Something like that?

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#123

Post by ozim »

didgetmaster wrote: post #86
CatMustard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?" "I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history." "Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."

Makes you wonder if the reason why some trivial bug in a closed source project goes unfixed for years; is because all the engineers are afraid to touch the code in some obscure library and instantly become its new 'owner'.

Mostly it is that you don’t go around fixing random stuff.

You might actually get in trouble picking up stuff that is not a priority.

Company I work for is less strict so we do “fix anything Friday”.

But for some other companies you might get a slap on the wrist for not following the plan and product owners pick what gets fixed and what not based on business plan. If there are big customers nagging - bug will be fixed asap.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#124

Post by pona-a »

Hendrikto wrote: post #82
pona-a wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think srchut is one solution. Its email workflow does successfully deter less experienced/curious people, for better or worse, and it still has some project discovery bit not social signals like stars.

It’s not a neutral service though. The owner is very opinionated and likes to get involved in what projects are and are not allowed to be hosted there, and changes these rules on a whim. In my eyes, this disqualifies Sourcehut for anything serious. You could get booted off any second, if Drew decides that he does not like you. (I like Drew, and I like opinionated and outspoken people. But Service Providers should be…

I think Sourcehut is the more portable of Git forges. Everything is stored in standard formats, its workflow isn't anything bespoke but just a good automation for git send-email, and I believe the source code should be all published.

In my eyes, if this ever does become a problem, migrating elsewhere wouldn't be that much trouble. When the "cryptocurrency purge" happened, maintainers were given 2 months of advance notice, which is a little short but reasonable.

[0] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#125

Post by pendenthistory »

My problem is I have non-competes and clauses in my contract which makes it difficult to talk about and publish stuff that I might want to turn into a product. So I'm sort of in a catch 22. I want to talk about what I'm building but I can't, not until I can convince myself that I can turn it into something real and I can quit and focus on it, and that's difficult to do without ever putting it out there to see if people want it enough.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#126

Post by ErroneousBosh »

blitzar wrote: post #50
esperent wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR". There's alre…

"when your fix is accepted you are the new maintainer"

That's how I ended up with FlaskBB I guess.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#127

Post by pona-a »

DANmode wrote: post #118
Hendrikto wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a neutral service though. The owner is very opinionated and likes to get involved in what projects are and are not allowed to be hosted there, and changes these rules on a whim. In my eyes, this disqualifies Sourcehut for anything serious. You could get booted off any second, if Drew decides that he does not like you. (I like Drew, and I like opinionated and outspoken people. But Service Providers should be…

Any recent/recognizable examples of this? They’re on my radar as an alternative. Thanks!

See my sibling comment. (TL;DR: they banned most cryptocurrency projects with 2 months advance notice)

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#128

Post by DANmode »

pona-a wrote: post #127
DANmode wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any recent/recognizable examples of this? They’re on my radar as an alternative. Thanks!

See my sibling comment. (TL;DR: they banned most cryptocurrency projects with 2 months advance notice)

That’s inconvenient - but balanced.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#129

Post by why-o-why »

aarondf wrote: post #104
why-o-why wrote: post #103

it's the same logic lotto uses: "you can't win if you don't play". while i agree it is irrefutable logic, the chance of being seen is quite small because there are literally millions of other people doing the same thing. gauging probability is what human brains have trouble with. but it does improve your odds a minuscule amount. but it is always always always better to have friends in high(er) places who can amplify…

And guess how you make friends in high(er) places... by... publishing your work and making friends in your industry

I don't know enough about different industries to know if this is true in general. But I do know in tech it is all about networking (aka soft nepotism): spending your career making friends ("swiping right on every work relationship"), and the fraction of those who go on to massively succeed you can then call in favors. At least that's how I made three huge jumps in my 35+ year career, and how the majority of my peers got the big step-functions in pay.

Perhaps in my original post I'm just confusing academia with industry, since I know so few academics.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#130

Post by ranger_danger »

didgetmaster wrote: post #84
Aurornis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR". The other spectrum that I’d like to know up front is where the maintainers fall on the spectrum of “I would be honored if you forked my project” to “This project is my baby and I will mobilize my users against you…

I wonder how effective it is for an OSS maintainer to try to prevent someone from 'stealing their project' when doing the fork is huge with plenty of resources (engineering, marketing, and legal) vs just some startup that is trying to gain some traction.

In my experience with exactly what parent comment discussed... it's not effective. In fact, the company may even (which I have witnessed personally multiple times) blatantly violate your OSS license to incorporate it into their proprietary money-making product, because they know they can get away with it... most lone devs do not have the money or willpower to attack a corporation, even if they could win.

Usually I see those lone devs either ignoring them entirely, or ragequitting open-source altogether.

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