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Comment by geoctl | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for your insightful feedback. I completely understand the criticism because Octelium is conciously designed to be many things at the same time. As mentioned in the other replies, Octelium is a unified/generic zero trust access platform that can fit in many human-to-workload and workload-to-workload use cases (the docs contain various examples in detail) that's why it might be confusing for newcomers. The initial commit came out of nowhere because I've been working on this project since early 2020 actually and decided to start with a clean public repo when I publicly released the code a month ago, after nearly 9000 manual commits over the past 5 years. I simply could not verify that I could have potentially leaked private info esepcially in early commits and the project itself almost entirely changed over the past 5 years from a simple remote access WireGuard VPN to what it is today in terms of architecture, features and complexity.

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I think the primary concern was you look like a State actor using a AI to generate a project you hope private companies will use and your intentions don't appear clear, and the verbose replies & github suggest a lot of effort into a facade without anything else.

One might posit that you're repackaging a fOSS project from somewhere with no clear ethos.

I have been developing the project solo on a private GitHub repo since 2020. I am not VC-backed or whatever else, Octelium has been a solo effort so far basically. The project itself is now 100% open source as you can see. However, even if I open sourced the initial private repo, what would make you believe that I am who I really am? maybe even all those git commits from 2020 weren't really from 2020 and their timestamps have been spoofed to make you believe so. If 100% of the codebase of the project being open source is still not enough, I guess nothing can be enough.

Don’t let these comments get to you.

If they don’t trust you, it’s their right, but then they should just not use the software, instead of writing this type of caustic comments. Poor form in my view.

Keep up, it looks amazing!!

If anything I am actually thankful to HN for the opportunity letting me show my work here. Negative comments are not really that big of an issue for me. I just wish they were generally clearer and more specific so that I can easily fix whatever needs to be fixed. Most of the complaints were simply related to the README while I was expecting and honestly hoping for critique for the architecture and internals of Octelium itself.

That is sort of the point of what you are considering “negative” comments. For clarity, my comment was advice on how you can improve the public persona of your project.

You seem to have pointed out but equally not registered that you identified exactly the issue: if your readme is filled with red flags, no one is going to invest their time (which is what you are asking for) looking at your code or trying it.

I completely understand as a developer how the “marketing” (readme) of a project may not seem that important or that it should be super accurate, and that it can be easy to fall into the pattern (as can be seen) of looking at every comment that brings voice to criticisms as being “negative”. You’re simply too close to the problem and are therefore only seeing the trees for the forest, while everyone is trying to tell you that you should probably remove the giant fence in front of the trees.

Thank you again. I meant by "negative" that they are critical as opposed to insulting. As I mentioned before in this thread, I usually don't find negative/critical comments offensive at all. Believe me, the last thing that I would want for an open source project that I have been working on for years now is to show it to people, especially technical people, with poor wording or hard-to-understand terms. That was never intentional by me. In fact, the reason that README is too long is that I wanted to explain all the features and use cases in detail while add additional links to the docs for those who want to understand more which probably made it even more overwhelming for those unfamiliar with zero trust architectures. I will definitely do my best to improve the README and docs with time as I get more honest feedback like in this thread. Thank you.

If these comments are “caustic” I’d recommend steering well clear of…the rest of the internet. These comments, from my perspective, represent a very pragmatic position from people who encounter scam bait daily in these same forums.

Should you be paranoid nowadays? yes you should.

Should a user call people posting their software here state actors and the such? I really don’t think it helps anyone.

Rather, they should lay out thier points, suggest how the author could change their mind. Alternatively direct their warning to others if they feel their conviction that this is malware is unshakable.

Given the nature of the proposed software, and reading through their other replies, its a legitimate concern.

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