Hacker News Reader

Comment by mirekrusin | Hacker News Reader

They are not suing anybody, just because it’s open source doesn’t mean talking about bugs is taboo. It reads to me like raw information, very good. They said they contacted authors helping with upstream bug fix. It’s great example how to deal with this kind of problems if anything to me.

View on HN

I agree it's a good example – if not great. But considering OpenAI itself is as closed source as can be, mentioning open-source software as the cause of their outage in the very first line of their statement seems somewhat out of place. I don't think it's a coincidence that the open-source comes in the opening line while the acknowledgement to the Redis team is at the very end. Many outside of software engineering might read this as «open source caused OpenAI to crash».

Ironically, this sort of insane takes everywhere on the thread is causing more harm towards the image of open-source developers than OpenAI or anyone could ever do with their press release. It's important to mention whatever open-source library caused a bug because that could be happening in many other applications that are using it. That's basically one of the main points of open-source.

What would your opening sentence have been?

It’s a great opening sentence. Short, factual explanatory. You would have to be hypersensitive to object.

As far as I can see, the whole thing is a reaction to OpenAI not being sufficiently open - which is a fine argument to have with them, but shouldn’t cloud judgement on the quality of this write-up

i'm not the person you replied to, but i'm guessing maybe they'd have preferred:

"We took ChatGPT offline earlier this week due to a bug in an external library which allowed some users to see titles from another active user’s chat history."

Thanks for that reply - yeh, that's a reasonable alternative.

But the bug resided in an open source library, not their own code. What else could they say?

Bugs will always exist whether you have a QA dept or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com