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Comment by bgwalter | Hacker News Reader

Users and companies can force you to continue to work on your project. Otherwise they'll fork it, make it worse, blame you for bugs they introduced in the fork, say that the original project wasn't that good, etc.

Basically, the fork now controls the narrative over your own work.

If you are completely immune to public opinion, it might work. But the more you invested in the project, the more famous it is, the harder it gets.

Open source started in an altruistic environment and has become slavery. Perhaps someone who was active in the 1990s will point out that it was a narrative even back then, at least it didn't feel like it.

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> Users and companies can force you to continue to work on your project. Otherwise they'll fork it, make it worse, blame you for bugs they introduced in the fork, say that the original project wasn't that good, etc.

How is it bad ? How does it force you to do anything ? It doesn't even interfere with your thing, which will keep scratching the itch your built it to scratch.

That is the whole beauty of free software: no one has any leverage on your project - any cooperation is voluntary !

I've heard so much "you should do this", "you should conform to this standard", "why don't you help me make this thing the way I want it ?", "your thing keeps me from making money with it" etc. Well buddy, I'm grateful for your opinion, and now I'll go do the thing with the people with whom I found shared goals.

It is good for you to feel that way, others increasingly view it as a narrative endorsed by big tech to get free labor and "AI" training material.

> "AI" training material

One of the things that I have been encountering, more and more, is the "GIGO" principle (Garbage In, Garbage Out).

Some of the code that I get from coding agents and chat LLMs, is laughably bad. It works, but only because the example has five different approaches to solving the issue, and only two of them work, etc.

I just spent the last two days, working around junk that I got, for implementing WebAuthn. I have it working now, and am grateful for the example, but I'd never ship the code I was given as an example.

If it solves your problem, why would you care about what other people do with it ? Free software isn't charity, just a way to find allies - usage by other people is a side effect which doesn't cost anything to the project and is entirely irrelevant apart as some input for the user-to-ally pipeline.

Have you ever spent a huge amount of unpaid time to create an innovative, successful open source project and then had it forked in this manner? If not, I don't think you can accurately predict how this feels. Especially if the forker takes credit for your work, raises large amounts of venture capital, and uses their fork in a way which directly competes with your original project.

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