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Comment by lispisok | Hacker News Reader

As much as I support community developed software and "free as in freedom", "Open Source" got completely perverted into tricking people to work for free for huge financial benefits for others. Your comment is just one example of that.

For that reason all my silly little side projects are now in private repos. I dont care the chance somebody builds a business around them is slim to none. Dont think putting a license will protect you either. You'd have to know somebody is violating your license before you can even think about doing anything and that's basically impossible if it gets ripped into a private codebase and isnt obvious externally.

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Protect you from what?

What harm is there to you if someone uses some of your code to build a business, as compared to not doing so? How are you worse off?

I’ve never understood this mentality. It seems very zero sum and kind of anti social. I’ve built a couple of businesses, and there’s always economic or technical precedent. I honestly don’t mind paying it forward if someone can benefit from side projects I enjoyed doing anyways.

You have a right to the work you author. If you are selling your work or your services, then you have to protect your product - yourself.

If you decide to put open source out there for others to use, then sure. You chose to allow that.

If you didn't license it for that, then it shouldn't be in an LLM.

And much as people joke about "exposure" not putting food on the table, being able to walk into a job interview with your name known because the company is already using your code/project is huge.

Exactly. If you are not actively going to compete in that space why not let someone else compete instead using your work?

If that someone then takes that work that you're providing for free to other people to build on it, makes a closed source product out of it and gives you no attribution, then you can be darn well sure I want to protect it.

> What harm is there to you if someone uses some of your code to build a business, as compared to not doing so? How are you worse off?

This someone might be someone I dislike. It would cause me some mild annoyance that they benefited from my effort.

It’s not healthy to let hypothetical spite guide your participation in civilization.

It's also not healthy to sip on whiskey or smoke some tobacco, but I do both on occasion.

Spite is also pretty pleasurable.

So let's say your side project improves your life by 5 happiness points. You have two options:

--- OPTION A - Keep your project private.

• You get five happiness points.

--- OPTION B - Make your project public.

• Other individuals may get a small number of happiness points.

• A megacorp might turn your project into a major product without compensating you and get a million happiness points.

• You get five happiness points.

----------

In either scenario, you still end up with five happiness points. If you release your code, other people may get even more happiness points than you, which isn't really fair. But you are no worse off, and you've increased humanity's total wealth of happiness points.

You really dont see why somebody wouldnt like a megacorp to take their hard work, use it to make a billion dollars, dont see a cent themselves, while struggling to buy a house in this very unaffordable housing market?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/total-happiness-in-the-world-...

Google, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Red Hat, etc. are huge players in open source, they probably contribute significantly more hours of work in building and maintaining major open source projects than the hobbyists.

Not that hobbyists don't contribute, but these models are certainly being trained on the work of salaried engineers as much as their trained on hobbyists' spare time projects.

Yea those companies do...but you know what? Those engineers working there contributing that code are getting paid to do so.

This assumes that none of the effects of making a project public or private have any impact on the output of your personal utility function, which may be true for you personally, but certainly cannot validly be assumed to be generally true.

> "Open Source" got completely perverted into tricking people to work for free for huge financial benefits for others

I'm quite conflicted on this assessment. On one hand, I was wondering if we would get better job market if there were not much open-sourced systems. We may have had a much slower growth, but we would see our growth last for a lot more years, which mean we may enjoy our profession until our retirement and more. On the other hand, open source did create large cakes, right? Like the "big data" market, the ML market, the distributed system market, and etc. Like the millions of data scientists who could barely use Pandas and scipy, or hundreds of thousands of ML engineers who couldn't even bother to know what semi positive definite matrix is.

Interesting times.

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