Comment by sheetjs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sheetjs | Hacker News Reader

We build open source tools for processing spreadsheet data (https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx is our largest and most popular open source project). Our open source tools have been used by government agencies, S&P 500/Dow companies, and startups alike. We've found people have taken the library, removed header comments, and sold as-is. Some startups have taken our web demo http://oss.sheetjs.com/, replaced the name with their own, and tried to use that to raise money. But those aren't really regrettable -- it's written off as "shameless people are shameless".

The truth is, you can never really know what would have happened if you didn't open source in the first place. Would an open source alternative emerge? Would people pay for your project or would it die in relative obscurity? That's unknowable.

If there's any regret, it's probably the amount of time spent doing support work for the open source libraries. It's not particularly interesting (usually pertaining to something in the README), time consuming (everyone seems to have their own secret project that they don't want to discuss, so you have to draw out the underlying issue slowly), and uncompensated.

I've discovered that "shameless people are shameless" is surprisingly common. I stumbled across a site for a new JS book one day, and it looked exactly like the personal site of one of our frontend developers. I asked him if he started selling his site as a template, and he goes pale. About 15 minutes later we found where someone had lifted all the assets off his site, replaced his name and photo, and put it up for sale on ThemeForest. Didn't even remove all the comments he left in the code. Dude was making about $2k a month with it. He ended up having to send him a cease and desist, and the guy only gave him about $3k as a settlement.

The comment wasn't intended to be diminutive. There happen to be many shameless people looking to make a quick buck, but few of those people would pay if you didn't open source in the first place (or if you offered them a chance to purchase a commercial license). Even with your coworker, the only reason he received money was because the offender made a lot more from it.

It's probably a good thing that people maintain a disdain for freeloading, though. It's important for at least some of the gains from a new creation to go to the creator, otherwise the market for whatever product will stagnate because the people with resources are not the people with ideas.

Freeloading but also copyright violation. No different to selling a cracked Windows installer.

OT, but are you still doing high frequency trading? How'd it turn out?

We stopped after our second support contract. Long story short: quite a few companies wanted additional features and we ultimately had to pick one thing to pursue.

> I've discovered that "shameless people are shameless" is surprisingly common.

Especially when it comes to China. https://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2008/03/25/do-the-chin...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/07/22/in-china-w...

With all due respect, these links are pretty dated and with an internet year being probably the rough equivalent of at least a half decade of the unwired world, they may not be relevant anymore.

Fair enough, but I don't think culture changes that quickly, especially in a country that large.

We're talking about people, not CPUs or flash memory. People change slowly.

How come he have only 3k? Why didn't the plaintiff fight for more?

I asked him about it, and it sounded like the guy had spent most of the money, but I don't know why he didn't ask for more. I got the impression that he didn't care if people used his site as a template, but he just didn't want someone else profiting from it.

Just curious - did you take any action against those who violated your license or did you just let them be?

And how does one even find out about such violations?

My company uses https://nerdydata.com to find websites that use our javascript tag without a license. So far it's been working nicely for us

We usually start with a simple email or phone call. Most developers and teams will reply quickly, especially when they are in the business of selling software.

Out of curiosity, why do you restrict the drop zone on your demo page to that tiny box in the corner, why not let the file be dropped anywhere on the page?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com