Ask HN: I've built an ethical pornsite, should I make it open-source? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I've built an ethical pornsite, should I make it open-source?

6 pointsmathix13 comments

I am currently building an ethical adult streaming platform that allows only verified independent content creators to publish videos and series. With Peach (the name of my company), I am trying to do things differently than existing platforms in this industry by prioritizing ethics and safety.

Right now, I am considering whether it would be a good idea to fully open-source the platform and backend. The only things that are currently blocking me are the fear that a competitor might use our technology without respecting licensing, and that bad actors use a zero-day breach to access customer data.

I would like to get your opinion on the idea. Would you do it? If so, what license would you choose?

*Disclosure* If you manage to find my website, I am not saying that everything is perfect now, there are definitely things I want to change, but I mainly lack time as I am the only person working on it. I am also starting pre-seed funding to build a team.

My brother gave me a formative bit of advice.

You can never take it back. Once you make it, and put it out there, what was yours is now everyone's.

I'm a FLOSS diehard, but I do not write and release much software for the express reason that I simply don't trust other people not to abuse the crap out of things. I set my end-of analysis posts much further than most (I tend to assume culpability beyond the 4th degree of seperation, where most prople abort at 1st or second for the purposes of my own analysis; impractical? Seems like, but has thusfar had a reasonably high success rate at helping me be able to sleep at night)

Note: I know ot seems contradictory, but it's one of the reasons I admire people like Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and the FSF/EFF as much as I do. The courage and conviction they demonstrate in my opinion truly makes them remarkable people.

This is kind of a fantasy workflow of mine: creating software for personal use, studying the implementation of others, and improving it--and no one has to see the code. It could always be licensed, but only if and when I had time to be both maintainer and a manager (of sorts).

I see a comment on HN from time to time about this. Someone building their own browser commenting on some implementation detail, but that's it (for example).

Because, once it's out there, yes--others can use it, or as you say, abuse it.

Do you have a (sanitized) example of how your thinking helped protect your software from being "exploited?"

(And here I mean the abuse you refer to.)

Er... It sounds like the comment above condones outright software theft. I do oppose that.

If an HN comment discusses an idea that could help in a personal software project, I would want to try my own implementation.

I don't mean go to the (possibly GPL'd) repo and just copy-paste everything.

At the same time, if it's my own project--even so a business plan, an investment strategy, or hardware schematic--attribute the credits, and go try it out.

The reason I'm on the fence with starting out proprietary or with the first commit including the LICENSE is that the latter is safest; and, it's easier to build with the intent to share from the start, then to clean it up later, even if it's never open-sourced.

But if it's exercise 7 of chapter 4 from a textbook, it's harder to predict a large, popular project grew out of that. Adding a license to everything seems overkill. Disciplined, but overkill.

First point: You need to think about generative AI porn, either how you might ethically integrate it (perhaps automatically training LORAs for your creators and paying them for its usage?) or how you are going to compete against it with "real" content. It coming for the porn industry like a tidal wave, and its coming in months, not decades.

> The only things that are currently blocking me are the fear that a competitor might use our technology without respecting licensing.

IDK if you are talking about licensing the content or code, but open source does not necessarily mean open licensing. Unlike others, I think open but proprietary code is perfectly fine and less risky that most fear. And if someone else illegally uses your framework in another country... who cares? There are a gazillion other frameworks they could have used anyway.

Anyway, in the context of generative AI, being open source would be much more important, as contributors would be highly motivated to fix and extend your generative backend, and that constant attention is critical for keeping up with the crazy development pace.

uh, don't want to sound like an ass but why build an entire platform from ground zero?

why not reuse something like peertube and make an instance on it. You could then divert your attention into making it pay-for-play (ha ha) or whatever you like and you get the benefit of the entire peertube community.

I know the feeling of doing everything from scratch but why waste resources when you can use them elsewhere?

That said, if you have already invested a lot of time/energy/money into the project, good luck to you.

Look at Agpl license. It is a pretty nice.

>The only things that are currently blocking me are the fear that a competitor might use our technology without respecting licensing, and that bad actors use a zero-day breach to access customer data.

if these are your only concerns then how about SSPL? no for profit company will touch your codebase because it is extremly viral meaning if they use your software, they would have to open source EVERYTHING ELSE ALSO.

If you don't want to go that far, Agpl is pretty nice as i said. Companies like google dont even allow it in their internal use because they would have to open source any changes.

Here is the thing, why do you want to open source the codebase? There is a slight but important difference between "Free software" and "open source" software so you should look that one up too to take pointers.

The way I see it, it can't be an ethical site unless it's Free Software, not just open-source. Proprietary software is inherently unethical no matter what you're building.

Since you mention you are trying to build a team, and your focus is on ethics, I'd suggest making your company into a co-op. Each team member gets 1 share of the company on hire, they lose the share on quit/fire. Profits split evenly among all members. This is how all companies should be run. Capitalism is parasitic and unethical.

I got your point, currently, most of the money (90%) goes to creators as the main goal is to pay them correctly for their work. 1% of platform income will be donated to "1% for the planet". And I am looking to integrate with fairmint.com to allow users/creators/random people to be a shareholder of Peach.

It is still far from a co-op, the issue is that it is already pretty hard to get funding in my industry (at least from European VC/Angels as I'm based in France) so I can't imagine how hard it would become if we were a co-op. But I would've loved the idea.

One area that interests me is if the same platform could be repurposed for some other domain.

Yes it could really easily, it's looking pretty similar to netflix or nebula.tv. In house video processing pipelines, everything is pretty standard, if you change the content it could be pretty much applied to any industries.

It even has a recommendation engine based on Neo4J DB, timecodes, categories tied to creators and videos.

If you're not sure, make some money and then pay a lawyer or security person to figure out the potential weak points. It sounds like a worthy undertaking, best of luck.

Thanks! Sure, I already asked my lawyers, but in their eyes, it's too risky. I still wanted opinions from people closer to the open-source community.

What benefits do you get from open sourcing it? It sounds like your operational policies are the main advantage you have.

> fear that a competitor might use our technology without respecting licensing

Yeah, people will, that's just reality.

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