[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing someth...
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Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?
Open source is usually seen as a win - for learning, visibility,
and the community. But have you ever regretted it? Maybe it became
a burden to maintain, attracted the wrong users, or got used in
ways you didn't expect. Would love to hear your experience - good
or bad.
Author : paulwilsonn
Score : 70 points
Date : 2025-08-02 11:37 UTC (3 days ago)
| sexyman48 wrote:
| Steve Ballmer nailed it when he said GPL is a cancer. No
| professional programmer wants to open source anything, but once
| one competitor does it, he must follow suit to stay competitive.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Um not down voting you, but your argument has some flaws.
|
| Firstly your appeal to authority , and then using Steve Ballmer
| as your authority is perhaps not the best way to start.
|
| Secondly you say that "no professional programmer" - but the
| statement is false. For starters it's a sweeping generalization
| which is trivial to show is untrue for at least 1 programmer.
|
| Thirdly the existence of Open Source alternatuve does not make
| a product uncompetitive. You need look no further than Windows
| to see that's true. Indeed if we has to list all the commercial
| software that exists with an Ooen Source clone, we'd be here
| all day. I'd also argue that Joe public doesn't even know what
| open source is, much less factors it into a buying decision.
|
| If you are building tools for programmers (already a tiny niche
| target market) then you need a hook other than Open Source
| anyway, cause programmers are a terrible target market.
|
| I say this as someone who builds tools for programmers, and who
| sells commercial into a space that contains Open Source
| alternatives. And I do ok.
| tliltocatl wrote:
| The marginal cost of software is zero and therefore the just
| price in a perfect market is zero. You can compete on
| delivering features quickly (and that's how all 80-00s software
| was - they were able to charge simply because no one was
| offering same features yet), but other than that there is no
| way software can be a profitable product without being a
| monopoly - and monopolies is not a thing to be tolerated. You
| can sell customer support, you can sell services, you cannot
| really sell software forever. Hate this as much as you want,
| but that's how things are.
| incomingpain wrote:
| >Maybe it became a burden to maintain,
|
| This is literally why i think AI coding cant touch dev jobs.
|
| In theory you can code LOADS of projects. Want a panel widget on
| your desktop environment, dont even know what language its in?
| ask ai to produce it.
|
| but when you have open source projects, people from all over the
| world bring their requests and problems to you. Some are great to
| just merge, others you have no clue what they are doing wrong but
| it's totally them; and you get paid in github stars? Now there's
| a bunch of open source projects that are just working for me
| every day, but i havent modified in years and they look stagnant.
|
| but even in the non-open source realm, no dev wants to forever
| maintain a project. Its not a regret, just 1 dev can probably
| only be responsible for a handful of codebases/projects and ai
| coding isnt going to super expand this.
| al_borland wrote:
| Isn't this the thing AI is going to claim to solve? A project
| exists, a user writes a feature request, the AI codes up the
| changes, pushes a new release, and everyone is happy. That's
| the sales pitch.
|
| The big issue with this, even if it works perfectly every time,
| is that there is no one at the core of the project with some
| vision and taste, who is willing to say "no" to bad ideas or
| things outside the scope of the project. We'd end up seeing a
| lot of bloat over time. I'm sure AI will claim to solve that
| too, just have it code up a new lightweight project. The
| project sprawl will be endless.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Everything will look like PHP functions.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > there is no one at the core of the project with some vision
| and taste, who is willing to say "no" to bad ideas or things
| outside the scope of the project.
|
| That can literally be a system prompt.
|
| "Here are the core principles of this project [...]. Here is
| some literature (updated monthly?). Project aims to help in x
| area, but not sprawl in other areas. Address every issue/PR
| based on a careful read of the core principles. Blah blah.
| Use top5 most active users on github as a voting group if
| score is close to threshold or you can't make an objective
| judgement based on what you conclude. Blah blah."
|
| Current models are really close to being able to do this, if
| not fully capable already. Sure, exceptions will happen, but
| this seems reasonable, no?
| autoexec wrote:
| > The big issue with this, even if it works perfectly every
| time, is that there is no one at the core of the project with
| some vision and taste, who is willing to say "no" to bad
| ideas or things outside the scope of the project.
|
| Why would any user ever care about the scope of the project
| or how you feel about their ideas? If they want your open
| source software to also play MP3s and read their email
| they'll just ask an AI to take your code and add the features
| they want. It doesn't impact anyone else using your software.
| What you'll probably have though are a bunch of copies of
| your code with various changes made (some of them might even
| have already been available as options, but people would
| rather ask AI to rewrite your software than read your docs)
| some listed as forks and others not mentioning you or the
| name of your software at all.
|
| Most people aren't going to bother sharing the changes they
| made to your code with anyone but eventually you'll have
| people reporting bugs for weird versions of the software AI
| screwed up.
| plumbees wrote:
| Never done open source but always wanted to. Developers of open
| source could always ask for a fee to add features, and easy prs
| are easy prs. But for those more complicated things that don't
| interest the main owners, could they offer a PR service where
| if you pay the developers or the project a fee, they'll take
| the time to review the PR and tell you what to do for it to be
| accepted, or keep a 5$ review fee and return the rest if it's
| just not a feature that jives with the project's overarching
| goals. I don't see why that cannot be a piece of the market. It
| would still be open source but it would add incentive to say a
| project is worth doing.
|
| Albeit I'm sure that most would likely not be willing to pay to
| have their code reviewed and accepted in a project; but on
| another hand, if I wanted to contribute to GNUCash and I didn't
| want to read the manual, or I found the manual hard to
| understand, it would be like paying for training. So it can in
| certain cases be win-win.
|
| And if it is a feature that is wanted, then there's no worry
| about it being reviewed. Or having to pay because the value
| will be obvious to the creators who will take it on.
|
| In other words: Pay the developer/maintainer to care about the
| feature you want.
|
| Has this ever been attempted and successful?
| em-bee wrote:
| _Developers of open source could always ask for a fee to add
| features_
|
| or ask for a donation. i am maintaining this in my free time.
| unfortunately i also need to work for a living. if you can
| contribute something then i'll have more time to work on
| this. if you need an invoice, i can provide you with one.
|
| i am actually working on a project right now where i want to
| do this.
| em-bee wrote:
| _no dev wants to forever maintain a project_
|
| unless i keep using it myself.
| pestatije wrote:
| i was asked for a third party lib exemption licence, i asked for
| a sweetener...no, they couldn't even answer me after that
| acheong08 wrote:
| I regret open sourcing my reverse engineering of Obsidian Sync. I
| did it mostly for personal use but thought it might be useful for
| others. After a bit of cat and mouse, they fixed all the
| "vulnerabilities" that let you change the sync and publish
| endpoints and now I'm still stuck using a very outdated version.
| I recently found another way to get it working on IOS again but
| definitely not publishing it.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Why do they consider it a "vulnerability" that you can change
| configuration of software running on your own computer? I've
| heard a lot of good things about Obsidian before, but hearing
| that basically burns it all up and means I'm going to strongly
| recommend nobody buy anything from them anymore.
| dtkav wrote:
| Obsidian distributes their software for free, and makes money
| on a core plugin called Obsidian Sync (note that it is not
| open source). Obsidian Sync relies on their cloud to offer
| e2ee file sync.
|
| Obsidian also has a rich plugin ecosystem with lots of open
| source plugins that are available and serve the same purpose
| (and you can use gdrive, dropbox, etc too).
|
| It makes sense to me that they released a proprietary privacy
| and security focused plugin (that is their core business) and
| they don't want other plugins to be able to arbitrarily
| change the server that their plugin is pointed at.
|
| Suppose they have a government customer who is using Obsidian
| Sync and the sync URL can be changed easily via configuration
| changes -- now the customer believes they are using Obsidian
| Sync, but actually their data is going somewhere else.
|
| I don't think you would be surprised to find that e.g. a
| dropbox daemon has protections to make sure it is pointing at
| dropbox.com. Why would you expect Obsidian to be different?
|
| (disclaimer: I work on a different plugin that adds file sync
| and collaboration features to Obsidian)
| acheong08 wrote:
| My opinion is that they should have a rule such that
| plugins from the official list can't modify the sync url to
| prevent abuse and phishing but the user should still be
| able to do whatever they want. The process for manually
| adding a plugin is already enough friction for users to be
| aware what they're doing is not "safe"
| trod1234 wrote:
| They believe that through licensing ultimatums you can give
| that ownership right up, and oligopoly and government's have
| agreed.
| al_borland wrote:
| I always just stick my Obsidian vault in iCloud and called it a
| day. No additional sync service required.
| nkrisc wrote:
| This works very well, been doing it for years. Even works
| flawlessly for me on Windows using the iCloud client.
| asciii wrote:
| Really, how? When I add a new page on my Windows client, it
| never reaches my phone and is stuck in some weird refresh
| icon state.
|
| I tried this on a windows laptop and another main machine.
| I just ended up keeping my iPad nearby.
| sshine wrote:
| This worked for me until iCloud started cache clearing all my
| files aggressively so my vault would take ten minutes to open
| on iPhone. Every few days.
|
| When I tried to copy my vault off iCloud, the copy failed and
| two years of notes were permanently lost.
|
| I'm never putting anything of value in iCloud again.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| Flashbacks to the time I copied iCloud
| pointers/placeholders thinking I was actually copying files
| with actual data. Oh well, who needed those few years of
| documents anyway.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Funny how Steve Jobs famously derided Dropbox as "a
| feature not a product" and yet even after trying for
| decades Apple can't get that feature right.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Can this work with a windows or nix system in the mix?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| This gets complicated when you want your vault accessible
| across linux/windows/android/macos/ipad.
|
| The ipad is the real stick in the mud and I don't want to
| deal with an icloud staging zone for everything else, or try
| to get icloud syncing on linux/android.
| nbaksalyar wrote:
| > you want your vault accessible across
| linux/windows/android/macos/ipad
|
| For that, I use Syncthing [1] in addition to iCloud. It
| works exceptionally well - I see my edits in real time
| across different devices.
|
| [1] https://syncthing.net/
| zaggle wrote:
| Why not create your own plugin? Or use Syncthing, Git,
| LiveSync, Remotely Save, etc...
| acheong08 wrote:
| 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 written with fyne (Go) but functionality is really
| basic.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I've open sourced a few things in the past that I wish I could
| have kept closed source for monetization purposes. Probably a
| failure of some imagination on my part, but also, it's really
| hard to make and sell good desktop software if a user can make
| their own for free by typing `make`.
| immibis wrote:
| Only if your target audience is nerds. Actually a bunch of
| software is like this and still somehow manages to make money.
| It's more complicated than typing "make", I promise - I typed
| "make" three times in this comment and your software didn't
| materialize.
| bhaney wrote:
| No
| mike-the-mikado wrote:
| Is that "No, I never open sourced anything"? Or, "No, I have
| open sourced things, but never regretted it"?
| bhaney wrote:
| The latter
| greyface- wrote:
| I tried to open source a weekend personal project while at $BIGCO
| via their "Invention Assignment Review Committee". It turned into
| a minor bureaucratic nightmare and I was ultimately never given
| the OK to release it, or any clarity over whether my employer was
| choosing to assert an IP ownership interest in it. In retrospect,
| I wish I had never notified them of its existence, and released
| it under a pseudonym instead.
| bitbasher wrote:
| Whenever I join a company I always create a bunch of made up
| names on my "prior inventions" list. When I open source
| something I just name it after something I put on my list if
| the description is close enough.
| toss1 wrote:
| ^^^^ Excellent idea and thinking ahead.
|
| Great suggestion to make in advance placeholders to contain
| side projects.
| neilv wrote:
| Do you think your colleagues have the same ideas of what is
| honest and trustworthy behavior?
|
| In what ways do you trust, and not trust, your colleagues?
|
| How do you feel about that?
| crazygringo wrote:
| What do colleagues have to do with anything?
|
| The better question is in what ways do you trust, and not
| trust, the company you work for?
|
| And the answer to that can be very complicated, and depend
| on the company a great deal. It also depends on who might
| buy the company in the future, and they might not be
| trustworthy at all.
| nemomarx wrote:
| The people approving this stuff are your bosses, not your
| colleagues.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I trust them to mind their own business and I do the same
| for them.
| tharne wrote:
| That is insanely clever. Love it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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
| company) and I concluded the safest path is to just not do side
| projects while employed with BigTech.
| lrvick wrote:
| Or live in California where forced assignment of personal
| time IP is illegal.
| ryandrake wrote:
| With an exception that is important if you work at $BIGCO:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44803482
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| This is insane. When I am out of work in France, I am out of
| work. Sure, I cannot write software that competes with my
| company but unrelated open source that does not being me
| income - yes.
| ihattendorf wrote:
| > I cannot write software that competes with my company
|
| That can be difficult when you work for a company that has
| it's fingers in almost everything.
| lrvick wrote:
| 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 of your brain on personal time.
|
| Corpos have tried to claim ownership of things I did in my
| personal time, multiple times. I just show them this law and
| they back down immediately.
|
| Having rights to my own brain is a big reason I live in
| California, cost of living be damned.
|
| https://california.public.law/codes/labor_code_section_2870
|
| IANAL, but know your rights!
| ryandrake wrote:
| There are two exceptions listed on 2870, the first one is
| going to be the gotcha. It excludes inventions that:
|
| > (1)Relate at the time of conception or reduction to
| practice of the invention to the employer's business, or
| actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of
| the employer;
|
| So, if you work at $BIGCO, they will argue that since they
| have their fingers in everything, that anything you might
| work on "relates" to their business or actual or demonstrably
| anticipated R&D. This is a truck-sized loophole.
| lrvick wrote:
| Ah, fair. More great reasons to never work for a megacorpo.
|
| There is not a paycheck big enough to make me give up the
| freedom to do whatever I want with my personal engineering
| time.
|
| I have only worked for employers that do just one thing, so
| this law offers me lots of protection.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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."
| tharne wrote:
| The other big reason is their glorious refusal to honor
| non-compete clauses. As I understand it, this was a big
| reason a lot of tech companies moved from Boston to CA back
| in the day.
| mik3y wrote:
| Ugh, you gave me bad flashbacks of the same committee.
|
| I tried to re-license a previously-released project (like from
| GPL to MIT or similar) and they wouldn't budge. I had written
| all the code.
|
| In the end, I decided that them suing (or firing) me to assert
| their ownership of $VALUELESS_PROJECT, so they could then
| license it back, was ridiculously unlikely, said fuck it, and
| did it. And I was right.
| em-bee wrote:
| the problem isn't your risk, the problem is the risk of the
| users of the project. if the code is owned by the company,
| your re-licensing isn't legal, and that could put other
| companies using it at risk.
| galad87 wrote:
| I wrote a small app to display a bitrate graph of video files,
| and posted the code on GitHub with the GPL2 license. A few weeks
| later someone uploaded it to the Mac App Store and sold it for
| 7$, the only difference was the name.
| phkahler wrote:
| If they're not complying with your license terms, sue them. If
| they are then I guess you missed the boat on money.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| 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
| kstrauser wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds like more hassle than it's worth. It
| should be free to file a DMCA claim with Apple, though, and
| get it yanked from the App Store.
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| That stings, but how many purchases do you think it's getting?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Did they at least attribute you?
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Not the OP, but I have a similar dilemma. I'm currently sitting
| on a SOTA ML model for a particular niche. I'm trying to figure
| whether I should try selling it to the incumbents (in some shape
| or form), or if I should publish a paper on the techniques,
| and/or if I should OSS it.
| arkmm wrote:
| IMO if you think you can sell to users within the niche, you
| can publish a blog post of benchmarks and that'll serve as
| strong technical marketing for your niche.
|
| It also keeps open the option to sell to an incumbent (possibly
| helps maximize the value of that option as well).
| dalemhurley wrote:
| Find some VCs that have funded similar projects and see if they
| think there is a market and if they would fund it.
| rglover wrote:
| I regret it only from the perspective that it opens you up to
| noise from smarmy, entitled, often wildly under-qualified
| developers trying to "get you" for not knowing something or not
| having some feature they claim is table stakes.
|
| And if it's not that, it's someone (who very well may be
| qualified) being unnecessarily passive aggressive trying to make
| a failure of your own seem like a show stopping nightmare that
| they'd _never_ let happen.
|
| What I really don't like is that sharing anecdotes like the above
| often invites equally annoying "tHaT's NoT mY eXpErIeNcE" type
| comments which leads to a sort of "who cares, just do the best
| you can and ignore everybody" mindset (which can be helpful at
| times, damaging at others).
|
| Aside from all of that nonsense, it's great because you have
| other sets of eyes looking around that may see something you
| didn't. This is incredibly valuable if you're a soloist or small
| team working on a big project.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| Here is one such story of regret for paint.net (not my project
| but I'm a fan). I think the author's take was quite reasonable
| for this project.
|
| https://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paint...
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| Got death threats because I wasn't prioritizing stuff people were
| requesting, said nah I'm done
| crinkly wrote:
| Lovely people no?
|
| I had death threats once for raising a github issue!
| pinewurst wrote:
| I open sourced a portable benchmark program and was getting
| angry responses because I wouldn't accept changes to make it
| Linux-specific.
| lrvick wrote:
| Just tell them to fork it. Done. No need to take any grief
| you do not want.
| enobrev wrote:
| Probably a bit rude, but maybe we can all agree to accept
| "fork off" as an acceptable, concise, and descriptive
| answer to unwanted requests.
| kstrauser wrote:
| "Go fork yourself."
| em-bee wrote:
| i'd go with "go fork it yourself". more correct, and less
| direct. makes it more like a creative insult where the
| recipient has to think whether they have actually been
| insulted or not.
| zote wrote:
| were you working on an emulator perchance?
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| Nope.
| crinkly wrote:
| About 10 years ago I was on a contract sabbatical from the usual
| job and the customer at the time open sourced part of the product
| with the wrong license, a competitor forked it and made a
| superior product, undercut them and took all of their customers.
| They had enough capital to buy the competitor but it was an
| extremely expensive mistake. I'm not sure they ever broke even.
|
| This was one of those niche industry specific things that no one
| would give a crap about if it was open sourced other than the
| competitor in the market.
|
| Principal architect was tossed on the street for that one.
| dakiol wrote:
| I did "open source" my static site generator. No forks, no stars,
| no PRs. I removed it from github since the only one who's taking
| advantage of it is probably Microsoft.
| doawoo wrote:
| 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
| all their problems for them for free was astounding, additionally
| another dev grant receiver was jealous that I got money close to
| their grant for "just making a crappy plugin"
|
| (paraphrasing but that was essentially what happened)
|
| No one is ever thankful lol.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Never regretted. But my "things" are far from earth shattering
| and most have now have better alternatives.
|
| Only one item became a bit popular, but was written for MS-DOS
| ages ago and I hear it is still used by 1 person :)
| ikidd wrote:
| PleaseReEnableSpacebarHeating.xkcd
| dfex wrote:
| There really is an XKCD for everything - thank you for the
| morning laugh kind stranger :)
| systemdev wrote:
| I regret open sourcing an offline patch I made for an Unreal
| Engine 3 game. The game was unplayable due to an always online
| backend that got shut down, but was still being sold so I
| required everyone buy a license to play with my mod. I had to
| reimplement stock UE3 netcode, and a bunch of other really cool
| stuff. Someone who was mad at me for not giving them more help
| when they struggled to develop on my software decided to "repack"
| my software and the game on a popular piracy site, both violating
| my AGPL license and increasing the risk that the whole project
| gets CnDd. I guess it's funny that a project violating a
| companies "no reverse engineering" clause is pissed that someone
| violated their OSS license, but such is life :D
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I'm very interested in your stock UE3 network code
| reimplementation, but I understand if you no longer publish
| these details.
| systemdev wrote:
| I'm afraid it's not as impressive as it sounds, but if you'd
| like to hear about it/see source feel free to shoot me an
| email at "the[at]realsystem.dev", I'm always happy to talk
| about it.
| firefax wrote:
| I wrote a network security tool (if you can call a glorified
| shell script that) and it was used by script kiddies to harass
| people.
|
| It made me feel maybe magicians had something, when they decided
| some knowledge should be esoteric and earned, given that it was
| so trivial I never listed it on my CV.
|
| I think infosec, as a field, sometimes darts between too much
| obscurity and too much openness.
| dalemhurley wrote:
| I remember back in the 90's when the internet was just
| beginning and script kiddies were constantly sending Back
| Orifice to people thinking they were "L33T"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice
| riazrizvi wrote:
| 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
| proprietary systems).
|
| Now, with LLMs, exposing your source code essentially hands over
| a large chunk of your hard won expertise for free to whoever
| wants to use it. That old model of 100% open source is broken, to
| my mind.
|
| The new approach I think should be open source stubs with demos
| of what is capable with your additional proprietary piece.
| teekert wrote:
| So it should be easy to reuse your open source code, but not
| too easy?
| riazrizvi wrote:
| A 'freemium source' model, where you're advertising
| possibility and promoting human-human partnership.
|
| Industry practices that over commoditize human talent are bad
| IMO.
|
| Our whole industry needs to bend its collective mind to
| maintaining economic participation. We've possibly put too
| much of a strain on society with LLMs. Especially as more and
| more people cotton on to what other services they no longer
| need, as models get better and better. We can't survive as a
| species if too much of our lives are based on self-
| gratification, we have to maintain the drivers that make us
| interact and learn to get along.
| trod1234 wrote:
| > The new approach
|
| That won't work. The breaking of that model is far more
| widespread than one thinks because of how it was broken.
|
| The breaking of the model breaks underlying models all the way
| down to the basis for economic distribution of labor.
|
| Its a phase change where labor and expertise are free, without
| restriction and the people with that expertise do not receive
| economic benefit for it anymore. In short, your demand curves
| goes to 0 in that area. There may be a great need for
| something, but if the demand is 0 no one will fulfill that
| need. People aren't slaves. Many people conflate demand with
| need, Hayek in his economics in one book cover the distinction.
| TL;DR demand is the group of people where there is a point at
| which two parties are both willing to exchange something for
| something. Need is where no such crossection between the S/D
| curve in exchange can occur for the two parties involved. One
| is much smaller than the other, and at 0, it doesn't happen or
| you only get the efforts of slaves.
|
| The trend is inevitably towards stalling the economic cycle,
| where such experts simply do not create such things, they do
| not share, the ones that could either abandon that expertise or
| they withdraw keeping it to themselves.
|
| The vast majority of all action though is done for economic
| benefit, and when that's no longer the case people don't do it.
| People aren't slaves.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| People, professionals, aren't so stationary. You're saying
| that this line on the asymptote is the threshold where
| incentives die. But the old axes need to be adjusted for new
| broader possibility. As long as professionals stay ahead of
| non-professionals by riding the same tools, to keep their
| position on the boundary of expertise, they will be in
| demand.
|
| Better to do that by not sharing how as much (source code),
| but rather what (interactive demos).
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| Two things immediately wrong: Stallman had nothing to do with
| Open Source; his movement is Free Software, which is at most a
| precursor to the separate, but sometimes overlapping, ideas of
| Open Source. Stallman also did not start Free Software so that
| people could make their creations available as evidence in
| resumes. He started the movement to empower software users
| after he felt powerless when confronted by a proprietary
| printer driver.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I see what you mean, but this knife cuts both ways. It makes
| proprietary software easier to write by extracting knowledge
| from open codebases, but it also makes open source software
| easier to write by extracting knowledge from those same open
| codebases.
|
| That's just the main idea, but also:
|
| 1. LLMs make existing software (even obscure stuff, so long it
| fits in the context window) more intelligible:
|
| - how do you compile this (when you are inexperienced and the
| ecosystem of that language is a baroque mess, it might seem
| impossible)?
|
| - what does this error message mean?
|
| - what parameters do I need to use in my invocation to get it
| to do XYZ?
|
| - what does this function do? why does it use this algorithm?
|
| 2. They also make new software easier to write, and existing
| software easier to modify:
|
| - ask about anything concerning the part of source code that
| fits in a context window, and you'll get a (probably correct)
| explanation of what it does, faster than a half-dead IRC
| channel or StackOverflow would respond
|
| - the above, but also: the LLM has infinite patience and can
| drill down as deep as you want. You can ask "OK, but why?" for
| as long as you want, as about anything you want. You might get
| a hallucinated answer sometimes, but a frustrated human who
| would be asked the same way, could also just make something up
| to shut you up.
|
| - for anything in the context window, ask about how to go about
| making a functionality change to add or modify a feature
|
| - the above, but if it's small enough, just get the LLM to
| write the change for you. It might be buggy and messy, but
| you'll be one step ahead if you lack the skill to make the
| change yourself
|
| - how do I set up the build chain? Why is my compiler not
| picking up the path properly? Is the project directory
| structure wrong? This used to be a huge problem before LLMs,
| and relied on undocumented knowledge.
|
| ---
|
| For me, the whole point of open source is ready-made,
| (hopefully) not too buggy components that I can use and
| customise as an end user, or plug into the thing I am building
| as a developer. LLMs make the freedom of FOSS become much more
| practical, particularly to those sympathetic to the movement
| but technically less experienced.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Well yes exactly. LLMs have increased the value of open
| source to users. So by reducing the extent of the open
| source, value is maintained, but rebalanced slightly back in
| favor of the creator, with their larger closed source piece.
|
| BTW most business-astute maintainers always managed a closed
| piece of expertise which is what they charged for. I'm saying
| that proportion needs to grow now.
| em-bee wrote:
| _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_
|
| ignoring the fact the big philosophical different between Free
| Software and Open Source, neither had the above as a goal. for
| the first decade or so of the movement, all Free Software and
| Open Source development was done by people in their free time.
| practically none of it was done at work. the exceptions are MIT
| and BSD projects which both predate the Free Software and Open
| Source movements.
|
| on other words, developers always had the ability to do stuff
| in their free time regardless of the license. those that live
| in countries that allow employers to own everything had to
| fight their employers to be allowed to do so, and they still
| have to do that. the cases where employees are getting paid to
| work on Free Software or Open Source are rare, although they
| are less rare today than in the past because more companies
| release their sources. but again, this was not the goal at the
| founding. at least not that this should help the developers.
| the goal was always to support and protect the users, to allow
| them to share and modify the software they use.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| The GPL he wrote is the basis of the reciprocity agreement
| that drove the open source movement, it is the legal
| mechanism that prevents commercial actors from taking over
| shared works, and locking other creators out of continued
| participation in their collective creations.
|
| Stallman explicitly warned about working on proprietary
| software for an employer:
|
| > "If I sign a nondisclosure agreement to work on a
| proprietary program, I am agreeing not to help you. I am
| agreeing to withhold information from you, and to refuse to
| give you a copy so you can learn from it." This isn't just
| about ethics toward the public -- it's about how such
| arrangements strip a developer of the ability to show, reuse,
| or build on their own work.
|
| GNU Manifesto (1985).
| surround wrote:
| > The purpose of Stallman's open source movement
|
| My understanding is that the purpose of Stallman's _free_
| software movement is "that the _users_ have the freedom to
| run, edit, contribute to, and share the software. " The FSF is
| focused on "defending the rights of all software _users_. " Its
| about the _users_ , not the developers.
| binary132 wrote:
| Free Software is not for resume padding, it's for free
| computing.
| jamesponddotco wrote:
| I open source pretty much everything I work on that is close to
| finished or finished. Never regretted doing it, but never got
| anything out of doing it either, aside from the feeling of paying
| forward.
|
| I guess it really depends on how popular your project gets. I
| have no idea if my stuff is used or not[1], so regretting is
| maybe kinda hard?
|
| I'll keep doing it, though. Might regret it at some point, but I
| get so much value out of open source, it feels wrong not to.
|
| [1]: Judging by the lack of patches I'd guess my work isn't used,
| though.
| ptmcc wrote:
| To some extent, yes.
|
| Most notably, I published a little browser extension I created to
| scratch a personal itch. It got a little bit of attention and
| users, and then the feature requests started coming. Among a
| couple reasonable ideas were big demands like make it work on
| different platforms, make it integrate with other sites, or make
| it work entirely differently. And unhelpful bug reports that
| often didn't even make sense.
|
| Not one of them ever contributed to the repo, and many of them
| were ungracious and demanding in nature. Fortunately nothing
| outright hostile, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth for
| daring to share a neat personal project as-is.
| erulabs wrote:
| 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,
| comparatively.
| runjake wrote:
| I don't know -- maybe.
|
| I've released several tools, and for most of them, I've heard
| nothing from anyone.
|
| But 3 got somewhat popular in their niche and most of the
| inquiries and requests were from people who seemed to think they
| were entitled to free support and feature requests. Many times,
| they got pretty rude if I refused to implement their feature or I
| took too long to release a fix.
|
| It really turned me off from releasing open source code and then
| interacting with users. I'd rather just release the code, and
| forget about it, only patching on my own terms.
| pentamassiv wrote:
| 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. A few months later I received
| a rejection. The letter said that the team doesn't have the time
| to review any more candidates. The code is under MIT so
| everything is perfectly fine. It is great that a company like
| Anthropic is using my code, but it would have been nice to
| benefit from it. I wrote a slightly longer blog post about the
| topic here:
|
| https://grell.dev/blog/ai_rejection
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