Maybe it became a burden to maintain, attracted the wrong users, or got used in ways you didn’t expect.
Would love to hear your experience - good or bad.
I’d strongly recommend trying again and reaching out to the friend of a friend who informed you of the role and asking for a more direct intro to the hiring manager. Unfortunately, it’s really really easy to slip through the cracks as a resume, and one feels no remorse rejecting a pdf file. Even without the warm contact, some way of directly reaching the hiring manager (notably: not the recruiters!) would mean that “I wrote that library!@ becomes front-and-center, not buried as a line item. I’ve seen so much more success with myself and the people I know in cold or warm outreach than through job application portals. In fact, I’ve yet to get a callback from a single job I’ve ever applied to online!
As an aside, does anyone know why the AI labs have such bad recruiters? I successfully got a job at one and am currently working there, but I still have many many complaints about the process.
Just look at the background of some of the names in this at these places. As always it’s “who you know and where you’ve been” not “what you know and what you’ve built”
edit: You can downvote if you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that high stakes tech has never been a meritocracy and AI companies are no different.
They're using their own slop generator to handle recruitment.
Sure, they could offer a job as payment for said license, or just pay cash.
This approach would be "necessary" (for some definition of necessary) for GPL code, but isn't necessary for MIT code.
[1] this assumes there's 1 (or nearly 1) copyright owner. If there are multiple contributors, and no CUA in place, this approach is generally not possible.
Personally, and different people have strong feelings on this both ways, with GPL code I'd get contributors to sign a CUA. It keeps the door open for commercial opportunities like this, especially if the code is "mostly yours".
What does it mean to offer a job? Can they offer a job that pays a dollar a year and call it a day? Or can you force them to offer you a job that pays a billion dollars a year?
Can they offer you a job, but only in Antarctica? What about visa sponsorship?
Of course, you can write whatever ill conceived terms you want in your license. But if your license is badly written, any decent company lawyer would strongly advice staying away from your code. And if that's the outcome you want: you might as well open source it with a 'non-commercial use only' license.
The permaculture ethical principle of “fair share” would apply here, if a group were using those.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'm not advocating in doing it for the exposure as a primary reason. And absolutely not to be paid in exposure. 100% agree with the comic there.
I should not have used that word. It is clearly charged with negativity.
Of course I wish everyone would be compensated for their work. I feel that for some types of project, publishing as open source is a great way for people to find and use it. This can give new opportunities.
Exactly which kind of project and under which conditions is up to debate.
I have worked on a few projects that I regret not being able to open source. Mainly not my choice, stakeholders wanted traditional go to market strategies and failed/ran out of money trying to make sales. I can't help but thinking what other opportunities could have arisen have we chose another strategy.
I made the mistake of also implementing keyboard and mouse monitoring---you know, so I could write automated tests for the input parts!---and over the years it has turned into an endless source of feature requests, bug reports and also general questions about the Python programming language and its ecosystem.
Input events truly are horrible to provide a platform independent abstraction over, but in the end seeing people use it, make YouTube tutorials and discuss it on Stack Overflow make it worth the time spent.
Anthropic would have found a different library or rolled their own, rather than taking that risk. If the library was fundamental, maybe they'd go for a commercial license, but that's usually an option of last resort.
If you have nearly limitless compute to throw at an issue and a good enough model, then it should be able to create enough test cases to cover most aspects of the codebase (iterating thousands of times until it gets it right) and then eventually write a new implementation in a new language or a slightly different tech stack that passes all of the original tests, alongside a few more hundreds of iterations of refactoring.
I give it a decade until large orgs are doing that to avoid licensing restrictions and other liabilities.
Wait, so, if it was a friend-of-a-friend situation, why did you not try to get a referral?
I've stopped applying to the big companies long time ago precisely because I'd never hear back regardless of the match or the credentials (the only exception has been JaneStreet — they contacted me almost right away after a cold application), yet going the referral route, it's relatively easy to get an interview almost anywhere.
(Submit it as a dedicated story here too!)
Everything else I've open-sourced has gone pretty well, comparatively.
But I also find the psychology behind this sort of reply interesting, because there's lots of factors that lead to this sort of extreme.
Firstly, we don't know the age of the replier, but my guess would be someone also young, or at least immature. Telling people to kill themselves is not something adults typically do in any context.)
So it suggests another junior, desperate to prove their own standing, and needing to compete against others rather than collaborate. I've seen this kind of response in one adult (abusive to other forum members) but he clearly had quite severe mental health issues (and the user was banned.) In youngsters it is usually extinguished with firm moderator guidance.
With adult responders, frustration and tedium play a role. Personally I'm more generous with replies in the morning than the evening. At times I almost "fake" patience (when I'm getting impatient) with people who are simply not thinking, and who aren't listening.
Overall it is very imbalanced. The asker is asking 1 question. The replier may answer tens or hundreds in a day. So it's hard to answer each one as if it's original, as if it matters, as if you've not heard it a million times before (especially if it's right there in the FAQ.)
Part of answering well, and the quality of any forum, is in participants answering well, even if the question is trivial.
We all were newbies once. Asking stupid questions is how we grew from there. Answering stupid questions is how we pay it forward.
One of my suggestions was that they include hash tables, rather than rely on records (linked lists with named key). Got flamed as ignorant, and I've never emailed that mailing list again. A while later, they ended up adding hash tables to the language.
My friend kept locking himself out of root and would be forced to single user the system to recover. This was difficult for many reasons, including remote hands costing up to and including $50 per call. I decided to look into why su would only work with root. Found a very simple check that I thought was unreasonable. Made my first patch and proudly posted to the FreeBSD mailing list thinking I was going to change the world. Man, instead I come back to everyone chewing me a new one, calling my friend too dumb to use FreeBSD, and other things that was not rooted in reality. I didn’t even try to defend my patch, I had spent so much time evangelizing FreeBSD up to that point that it really made me question my support of the project.
Anyway fast forward like 5 years, I was telling the story to coworkers when I decided to look up the su source. shocked-pikachu someone took my patch and applied it (without attribution). I have since moved on from FreeBSD entirely and my open sourced works have never been so negatively picked apart again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Telling someone to kill themselves is wildly inappropriate and shouldn't have happened to you.
When people reminisce about "the old internet" they tend to forget how hostile it was.
Being devils advocate it wasn't common for young people to engage in the activity but harsh and unfair critic was happening often.
It still exists today, but in much smaller scale than back then.
This is a wise conclusion, that I think impacts many people. I know it does impact me. My personal way of going about it was that I was more invested into theoretical, ethical problems instead of my actual life problems that surrounded me. My tech life was vast and colorful, but my real life was barren.
Do I expect praise, kudos, fame, whatever? I do and that happens, I have been hired countless of times because of open-source. Even my friends (!) have been hired because of open-source stuff I wrote and they contributed to.
But the main motivation is internal - I just have to see it take shape. Like a writer who can't resist painting or a writer who can't stop writing.
Do I have regrets still? Yeah because I could have used the time for better things. But that can be said about any hobby.
Long long (2016 ish) ago I released an Unreal Engine 4 plugin that let people embed chromium embedded framework views into the engine via textures, so you could make fancy HUDs or whatever.
Epic Games was kind enough to give me a developer grant for open sourcing and making it, cool as hell for a college student at the time, helped pay my classes.
The number of angry game devs who basically wanted me to solve all their problems for them for free was astounding, additionally another dev grant receiver was jealous that I got money close to their grant for “just making a crappy plugin”
(paraphrasing but that was essentially what happened)
No one is ever thankful lol.
Say you made a plugin that serializes/deserializes to JSON. They making an FPS and the gun doesn't shoot in the correct direction. They'll ask why it's not working in your support area, even though it's got nothing to do with your plugin.
The folks who are in proximity, folks with requests and complaints.
It actually paid few bills in my case! Regards.
After I left I would still receive emails from frustrated users, but I had no access anymore. I could have forked it, but it just seemed too messy. I made some suggestions and wished them luck.
There is a lesson here, somewhere, but mainly it just convinced me to not rock the boat for the next decade, and to seek out smaller companies for employment.
Both of them expressed regret for not commercializing it. The weird part for me, as the interviewer, was hearing them imagine how wealthy they’d be if they had commercialized it instead of releasing it as open source, entirely neglecting the fact that the projects became popular because they were open source.
I imagine this is the thought process behind the various projects that try to go closed-source and commercial after a certain point.
I can see why people have these fantasies. Huge businesses have been built on open source code bases.
Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.
The place where I disagree with your take is that commercialization and open source popularity are not mutually exclusive at all. The FSF makes this quite clear: open source is 100% compatible with charging money for some kind of service or for the convenience of a binary or something like that.
Software freedom is really about availability of the source code and your right to modify and distribute your modifications, not free as in beer freedom.
Commercializing it doesn’t have to mean bleeding customers dry, it can be something where most people are not paying a dime and are enjoying a fully open source experience. I think nginx plus is a good example of that sort of model. I have never met anyone who pays for nginx but there’s some big companies with big company problems that do.
Another example is Discourse forums. You can pay for support and hosting.
‘Business owner’ in the sense of owning stock, sure.
Save 10–20% of your income. Invest it in index funds (we can argue about which particular indices). Work for a few decades. Retire wealthy.
Then bequeath that wealth to your heirs when you die, giving them a leg up on this whole process.
> Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.
The employer takes the risk that the software will have no benefit at all. We get paid no matter what. I like that trade. I’ll invest in a diversified market index rather than my single program, thank you very much.
People working in finance or (in the year 2025) as AI researchers with fantastic signing bonuses for switching to Meta might want to disagree.
A large salary is still a salary.
A business owner is unconstructed by the market value of their labor.
Another way: marry someone rich. Understandable that it did not occur to you or most people here, because most here are likely to be the XY chromosomal variety.
There's plenty of companies that offer stock compensation. You may have to move to work for them, of course.
That said, the flat hourly fee may be a better deal. If you take a % of the profits, those profits may be negative!
Companies adjust their stock compensation plans to ensure they don’t exceed market rates of compensation.
a) sell support contracts
b) have contributors sign copyright agreements, license the project as GPL/AGPL, and then sell commercial licenses for people who can't use that
which seems to be by far the most common
Selling support contracts is actually hard.
GPL/AGPL preclude widespread adoption (these days) — the grandparent explicitly mentioned “permissive” licenses.
They made an open project and let the community contribute to it and adopt it.
They wished it was a business, not a project. A business has support, sales, and higher expectations than the serve-yourself open source projects
„Open source and free*” asterisk for „until I get traction or VC money”.
That’s bait and switch and riding on community good will.
Is free fork enough or people should get paid? Does that project owner hire some of people from community, what about ones left out?
- Mullenweg, or some other hack
Obsidian also has a rich plugin ecosystem with lots of open source plugins that are available and serve the same purpose (and you can use gdrive, dropbox, etc too).
It makes sense to me that they released a proprietary privacy and security focused plugin (that is their core business) and they don't want other plugins to be able to arbitrarily change the server that their plugin is pointed at.
Suppose they have a government customer who is using Obsidian Sync and the sync URL can be changed easily via configuration changes -- now the customer believes they are using Obsidian Sync, but actually their data is going somewhere else.
I don't think you would be surprised to find that e.g. a dropbox daemon has protections to make sure it is pointing at dropbox.com. Why would you expect Obsidian to be different?
(disclaimer: I work on a different plugin that adds file sync and collaboration features to Obsidian)
When I tried to copy my vault off iCloud, the copy failed and two years of notes were permanently lost.
I’m never putting anything of value in iCloud again.
I tried this on a windows laptop and another main machine. I just ended up keeping my iPad nearby.
The ipad is the real stick in the mud and I don't want to deal with an icloud staging zone for everything else, or try to get icloud syncing on linux/android.
For that, I use Syncthing [1] in addition to iCloud. It works exceptionally well – I see my edits in real time across different devices.
As a free software enthusiast, this screams "don't invest time in closed ecosystems".
Great suggestion to make in advance placeholders to contain side projects.
In what ways do you trust, and not trust, your colleagues?
How do you feel about that?
The better question is in what ways do you trust, and not trust, the company you work for?
And the answer to that can be very complicated, and depend on the company a great deal. It also depends on who might buy the company in the future, and they might not be trustworthy at all.
Sure, a company could not like you doing that and find a reason to fire you, but they have no valid legal recourse and you may even be able to sue them for wrongful termination.
We are one of the only states that prevents employers from having ownership of your brain on personal time.
Corpos have tried to claim ownership of things I did in my personal time, multiple times. I just show them this law and they back down immediately.
Having rights to my own brain is a big reason I live in California, cost of living be damned.
https://california.public.law/codes/labor_code_section_2870
IANAL, but know your rights!
> (1)Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer;
So, if you work at $BIGCO, they will argue that since they have their fingers in everything, that anything you might work on "relates" to their business or actual or demonstrably anticipated R&D. This is a truck-sized loophole.
There is not a paycheck big enough to make me give up the freedom to do whatever I want with my personal engineering time.
I have only worked for employers that do just one thing, so this law offers me lots of protection.
I was once advised to take a vacation to California every year and do all my thinking then. But I hate wasting fuel, and it'd be so much more fun to say "this little park in the middle of Detroit is actually California soil", and just walk down there every few weeks with my notepad, and ponder what problems need solving and how.
I've had experience with a similar "committee" (probably same company) and I concluded the safest path is to just not do side projects while employed with BigTech.
That can be difficult when you work for a company that has it's fingers in almost everything.
That's why so many repos say "Not an official Google product." That's the boilerplate of someone's side project that got open sourced, but Google wanted to claim copyright.
I tried to re-license a previously-released project (like from GPL to MIT or similar) and they wouldn't budge. I had written all the code.
In the end, I decided that them suing (or firing) me to assert their ownership of $VALUELESS_PROJECT, so they could then license it back, was ridiculously unlikely, said fuck it, and did it. And I was right.
And then I saw that maintainer not just ignores but closes every else PR with these words:
> your contributions are too undisciplined and difficult to review. please just make sure there are issues filed for the problems and let a core team member or other contributor solve it. [1]
I have directly asked maintainers to merge at least one PR [2], because I see someone is in the middle of refactoring whole backend, but got ignored.
I have rage closed all my contributions and made most of my projects private. I think I will never go open ever again.
[1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/21426#issuecomment-30823...
Two deleted messages on ZSF had this content:
> SPIR-V at master is still broken. I tried to help Zig. But PR never gets merged. I had to update it 3 times. It lasted for a month. I have updated all SPIR-V dependencies. You don't care about SPIR-V anyway, why I was threatened this way?
> Sorry for my contributions.
I was really disappointed when I wrote this, and I thought that nobody should see this to not harm maintainers and the project itself, so I deleted them. Then I got banned on Zulip without a reason.
I just wanted to make Zig closer to 1.0 release.
[3]: https://zsf.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/454360-compiler/to...
First off you're allowed some self deprecating humor. Second where did you pull that quote?
Maintainer had a year to review the PR. It's obvious they want to solve it their way. Perhaps the maintainers wanted smaller PRs. Perhaps the maintainers got spooked by vibe coder. Still no reason to treat even an LLM that badly. I'm no saint, but I closed worse PRs with less hostility.
As for the author of the one-year-old PR, he was surprised:
I have open sourced it and shared it on a few places and got zero traction. Ok, I thought, I can talk about it here and there, so it would get more visibility. People don't like it much since I'm promoting my own tool. I posted a blog post about some technique on tool's website and people seemed to like it on Reddit. A few people wrote comments like "interesting" or "amazing" and I was happy for the first time. Then someone wrote that you should not make your friends/alt-accounts comment on your posts, it's cringe and that happiness went away.
I've been a lurker on social media nearly whole my life. Putting myself out there feels like an unpleasant experience. I'm still deciding whether to continue or just go back to lurking and keep my tool to myself.
I'd be inclined to suggest not to let the 1% annoying people spoil it for everyone else if you can help it.
Most people know to see through and recognize these annoying people and their toxic comments and know to appreciate the good work.
Sharing your work as open source is still an amazing thing to do despite the annoying vocal minority and many people appreciate it even if they don't say much.
Of course, your own sanity and health is the most important thing.
Thanks for having shared your work as open source until now and good luck for the future, whatever path you end up choosing.
Also: write your open source stuff for yourself. Share it but don't wait for validation. That's bonus but your motivation should come from inside. IMHO.
> (…)
> Then someone wrote that you should not make your friends/alt-accounts comment on your posts, it's cringe and that happiness went away.
Respectfully, if you’re that easily discouraged you should not in any way attempt to “create a community”. Having a popular open-source project isn’t glamorous, it’s extra work for you. It’s entitled users making demands and opening crappy bug reports, punctuated by the occasional decent contributor and even rarer exceptional one.
Make your tool available and let it be. Mention it only when relevant, and even then think twice. Make it clear the tool is for yourself and you may accommodate respectful requests which make sense for your vision of the project, but make no promises. Do what’s enjoyable, don’t try to chase fame and notoriety.
A middle way might be to do like some people and use a license that allows only viewing the code for some months/years and then allows all the normal software freedoms after that time. In the meantime, you get to work on it and keep yourself ahead of any copies that would need to work off of old versions, but if you get hit by a bus or for other reasons abandon it, it's automatically open sourced. I kinda like that mechanism because there's so much abandonware where it would have been really cool to have this. Though, if it's a serious concern that someone copies it like this, it might be a lot of pressure unless the source-available time is very long
Around 2005-6 I wrote a Mac OS X client for Xbox Live. The idea was I wanted notifications on my computer when my friends came online and started to play certain games, so I could turn on my Xbox and join them. This is a feature of the Xbox mobile app today of course, but back then all you could do was either be on the Xbox or sit around refreshing a web page, so the app was useful. I published the source and the binaries on Google Code, partly because I just wanted to share the app for free, and partly because I wanted to be transparent that I was handling the Xbox login credentials safely.
One day the app blew up and got a lot of coverage in tech news and link aggregators (like Digg, haha) and I suddenly had a ton of users. Eventually I figured out why. It wasn't that my app was so great exactly, but rather the idea that Google was writing a Mac client for Xbox made a great tech news story. However, that part of the story wasn't true, the project had nothing to do with Google, I was just hosting it on Google Code because it was at the time the most convenient place for a small open source project.
The episode made me wonder how often that happened. How many other projects on Google Code became part of a news cycle because people misinterpreted them as being written or endorsed by Google? Was that part of why Google Code was shut down?
I don't remember the exact details, and I was way in the backend (Kythe), not the frontend part of it. But my extremely hazy recollection is it probably had more to do with the gwt deprecation than anything else. There was headcount for awhile put on making an angular (?) replacement for the old gwt frontend, and I guess that didn't extend to also making a replacement for Google code.
Again, super fuzzy recollection here, from someone 2 teams away.
I thought it sounded pretty plausible for that era of Google.
Even though the README links to live tests (browser JS libs), the person submitting the PR rarely includes tests so that's one issue. Sure I can say "I'll be happy to accept this if you could please add some tests?" but then that leads to the 2nd issue. PRs are rarely quality PRs and if I want to add the feature I end up having to re-write whatever they were trying to add from scratch.
I know people are claiming LLMs will make things worse for many projects but an LLM can likely at least read what's there and try to make things that follow the conventions?
I also know I'm under no obligation to accept any PRs. It's not that easy to say no for me, depending on the ask.
[ ] Added unit tests
[ ] Included a screenshot of the code working (this helps reviews go faster)
But a few people have reported certain fundamental problems with my approaches or have otherwise put in a significant amount of work to debug and fix issues, and they've been extremely helpful and I can only hope I'll get more of them in the future.
It made me feel maybe magicians had something, when they decided some knowledge should be esoteric and earned, given that it was so trivial I never listed it on my CV.
I think infosec, as a field, sometimes darts between too much obscurity and too much openness.
In general, the new ML sploit-bots can fuzz and inject faster than any person.
Meh, most issues are from the consumer architecture being deployed in industrial settings. Most modern Intel/AMD PC come with side-channel hardware RATs from the factory. =3
I certainly keep my own "grimoire" of useful code.
my works had one condition: attribution
now it's all been slopped up by "AI", without attribution, primarily to devalue the labour of software developers
It remains an open question on who's responsibility it is to not distribute infringing AI works. The developer or the the user of the AI. Legally it is unclear due to a lack of cases providing precedent in such a new situation. Morally I think AI developers do consider it a duty to reduce such behaviour to a minimum, but also believe that the benefits of the AI are significant enough that it would be unreasonable to block access to them because of the existence of failure modes.
When it comes to being "slopped up" which is a weird phrasing in itself, but I gather you are trying to repurpose the term "slop" to add additional pejorative tone to you words. I'm not really a fan of 'slop' as a term for AI output because it is used specifically as a term for AI output. Should it be used as a blanket term for low effort, mass generated content it would be reasonable, but when it seems to apply specifically to AI it carries the implication of prejudice. Choosing to move it to a verb describing input removes all of the meaningful aspect of the term leaving only the prejudice. Just go with "slurped up"
That brings us to what training actually is, Reading. There is no requirement for attribution to read something. There is no requirement for attribution to learn from something. The restrictions on reproduction are there in recognition of your work representing the ideas. The ideas themselves are not copyrightable, This is widely recognised legally and morally. Scholars have written volumes on why this should be the case and how bad it would be if the alternative, a world where people could own ideas themselves, were true. Imagine the wealth imbalance that exist in today's world, now extend that imbalance from money to the very ideas that you use to express yourself.
AI should not reproduce your work by terms you have not agreed to. You have a valid complaint when it does that. My concern is that people appear to be extending their claims to suggest that they control the right to be learned from. That is not true, right, or moral.
> My concern is that people appear to be extending their claims to suggest that they control the right to be learned from.
Some would claim that training actually is not reading / learning but embedding / encoding. This take creates arguments like the following;
If I were to take his work and gzip it; does that mean I should be able to use it?
Why? Because this is an automated system. You are anthropomorphizing it unwarrantedly.
Not to mention usual copyright arguments like "If I memorize his code and write it on my computer by hand; can I do it now? What if I only remember 90%? 80%? What if I just change variable names?"
This isn't as cut and dry as you make it out to be, in my humble opinion.
With regard to percentage change, that is not a factor of whether or not a reproduction should be allowed, but rather if something can be considered a reproduction. That should be a task for domain experts, and I think historically that has been done, Even Philip Yorke did that.
It is certainly not cut and dry, generally I tend to argue precisely that point when it comes to the details, but the guiding principles are clear.
Ideas are not copyrightable.
The laws involved are supposed to benefit society as a whole.
Patents provide some protection in the area of ideas. While heavily misused they are intended to incentivise development to make things actually work granting some exclusivity as a reward. A pure idea should not be considered enough (but often is) it ought to be the application of the idea.
Copyright is intended to promote creativity by offering a means to generate revenue from a creative work. The goal was to produce more (or at the least avoid inhibiting) works providing rewards to those who produce them.
There are issues today with laws being influenced to benefit a minority. A lot of IP laws were created in this way. I think the solution is to advocate and work towards laws that benefit society as a whole. Unfortunately people seem to see the imbalance and it normalizes the view that you should leverage the notion of intellectual property to get something for yourself (or your tribe).
The world is changing, when the notion of copyright was first Expressed, there was no ability to create a thing and then sell a million of them with no extra effort. When mass production and then mass media enabled this it allowed more creative works by allowing the cost of the work to be distributed across many. It was never the intention for copyright to enable a few people to get wealthy from a few popular works. As soon as the dominance of those few popular works made it harder for other creatives to make things themselves, copyright law started acting against the principles that it was founded upon
I believe it was the single most important decision we took as a company and probably also contributed to a large part to the growth and success we are having now. It enables us to build a really strong community, and also differentiate ourselves clearly from other manufacturers that are all pretty much only offering proprietary solutions.
But I think people need to be aware that by open sourcing, they put the company on a different trajectory. For example you are basically making yourself a lot less attractive for VCs.
When I see how much other companies can get investments that help them grow faster and make more impact is the only times when I sometimes wonder if other models might have been a better option?
Most notably, I published a little browser extension I created to scratch a personal itch. It got a little bit of attention and users, and then the feature requests started coming. Among a couple reasonable ideas were big demands like make it work on different platforms, make it integrate with other sites, or make it work entirely differently. And unhelpful bug reports that often didn't even make sense.
Not one of them ever contributed to the repo, and many of them were ungracious and demanding in nature. Fortunately nothing outright hostile, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth for daring to share a neat personal project as-is.
About six months later someone took my code, removed my name from it, made some small changes that didn't change its behavior at all, and re-published it. By that time I had moved on and wasn't aware that it had started to take off.
The man page now has someone else's name on it as author. I don't really regret publishing it but I wish I had put a copyright notice and license on it.
Are you sure? That's before the US joined the Berne Convention, and also not long after the Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980.
I do not regret making their source available for people to learn from and extend. I'm not even mad they're making money. I just would have liked, in hindsight, to have used a license that guaranteed me some iota of credit in the finished product. Particularly in things where I built the entire finished product - that is to say applications, not libraries.
MIT is fine and good for libraries, but full blown tools where I built the actual UI, and people aren't even extending it but are just re-hosting it and in some cases claiming they created it? I should have used something else.
I wrote a post about it that got picked up by certain types and used as an argument against open source generally. That interpretation is almost as frustrating as the situation with the licenses, and isn't what I was attempting to say at all!
I love open source, I love the MIT license. I just think it makes more sense for me to use on libraries than finished applications.
Even if you had made it AGPL, people deliberately violate that all the time, and usually the only recourse is enforcement through costly lawsuits.
I had death threats once for raising a github issue!
I don’t regret open-sourcing this project but god as your project becomes popular bad apples start joining and ruining the party for everyone. Fortunately it’s only a tiny minority, but it’s what stays the most on your mind.
This is literally why i think AI coding cant touch dev jobs.
In theory you can code LOADS of projects. Want a panel widget on your desktop environment, dont even know what language its in? ask ai to produce it.
but when you have open source projects, people from all over the world bring their requests and problems to you. Some are great to just merge, others you have no clue what they are doing wrong but it's totally them; and you get paid in github stars? Now there's a bunch of open source projects that are just working for me every day, but i havent modified in years and they look stagnant.
but even in the non-open source realm, no dev wants to forever maintain a project. Its not a regret, just 1 dev can probably only be responsible for a handful of codebases/projects and ai coding isnt going to super expand this.
Albeit I'm sure that most would likely not be willing to pay to have their code reviewed and accepted in a project; but on another hand, if I wanted to contribute to GNUCash and I didn't want to read the manual, or I found the manual hard to understand, it would be like paying for training. So it can in certain cases be win-win.
And if it is a feature that is wanted, then there's no worry about it being reviewed. Or having to pay because the value will be obvious to the creators who will take it on.
In other words: Pay the developer/maintainer to care about the feature you want.
Has this ever been attempted and successful?
It's unclear how successful they were with this. Phabricator lasted for about a decade before announcing the end of its development, not all of which was as a stand-alone company. The announcement didn't say why they stopped.
The big issue with this, even if it works perfectly every time, is that there is no one at the core of the project with some vision and taste, who is willing to say “no” to bad ideas or things outside the scope of the project. We’d end up seeing a lot of bloat over time. I’m sure AI will claim to solve that too, just have it code up a new lightweight project. The project sprawl will be endless.
unless i keep using it myself.
Then I accidentally wiped the database powering my blog, lost all the content, and had loads of people asking me to rewrite them all. Most people were polite, but there were a lot of pushy and entitled people as well... It's a bit of a shame because it was by far the most popular thing I ever did, and they ended up being a massive pain and regret
- https://web.archive.org/web/20220823113634/https://ewanvalen...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20220823104052/https://ewanvalen...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20220820044449/https://ewanvalen...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20220811080027/https://ewanvalen...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20220820045729/https://ewanvalen...
On the other hand I open sourced my blog and received lots of small contributions to fix typos or such which were nice.
It's hilarious, especially their UI team that only follow trends but still know better than their users.
It kinda matters if you build something as a proof of concept, or you build it to exercise some new technique, or you build it to improve the state of the art, or you build it as the foundation for a product etc.
You wrote it "for fun". That's an excellent reason to write something. I can appreciate your effort in that context. It's going to have rough edges etc. And when it's not fun anymore you move on.
Someone else might write the same thing, but for a different reason. Maybe they want a "better Kotlin compiler". They intend to make it perfect, build a product around it and so on. This sort of project encourages a different level of scrutiny than something fun.
So giving context to a project helps attract the right kind of attention. And more importantly the right kind of other-peoples-time.
But yeah, asking like that is not terribly polite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#:~:text=The%20sou...
The author was on the core team for another project in that space (I think busybox). He saw first hand how copyleft sounds good but ends up being lots of friction with no practical benefit, and vowed to public domain all his projects after that. BSD0 is him giving a name to a public domain grant so OSS people could recognize it.
https://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paint...
This was one of those niche industry specific things that no one would give a crap about if it was open sourced other than the competitor in the market.
Principal architect was tossed on the street for that one.
I strongly believe in the principles of OSS for things like frameworks and tools that everyone in the community can benefit from. But, when it comes to extremely complex end products like Word, Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc., it's a lot harder for me to buy the community-is-better argument. Even in some cases the frameworks & tools being semi-proprietary has major benefits (.NET/Visual Studio dev experience).
There are tradeoffs with everything. The key is focusing on the customer. Who do you want to keep around as your customer? You aren't going to make everyone happy. Someone is always going to be pissed at your particular approach. Might as well take a path that makes you a little bit of money if you can.
It also keeps open the option to sell to an incumbent (possibly helps maximize the value of that option as well).
If you do that, you will eventually lose with depression or other heavily overfitted reactions.
I build open source for myself, and for myself first. Not for others, not for appreciation, not for "likes" or similar.
I don't expect anything in return. If you want to be part of it, start to contribute. But with everything in life, trust has to be earned slowly over time.
Having said that, I always believe in the good of people. Though I am pretty sad and disappointed how some parts of the internet made me their artificial enemy because I don't submit to social pressure and couldn't care less about the chan folks.
Always remember: The loudest on the internet are not the most.
Now, with LLMs, exposing your source code essentially hands over a large chunk of your hard won expertise for free to whoever wants to use it. That old model of 100% open source is broken, to my mind.
The new approach I think should be open source stubs with demos of what is capable with your additional proprietary piece.
do you want to give RMS a heart attack?
RMS founded the Free Software movement to protect the users of software.
to redistribute power back into the hands of creators who were getting walled out of anything but proprietary work for an employer. If they were fired, they had nothing to show for years of work except a reference, since their deep expertise was essentially meaningless
ignoring the fact the big philosophical different between Free Software and Open Source, neither had the above as a goal. for the first decade or so of the movement, all Free Software and Open Source development was done by people in their free time. practically none of it was done at work. the exceptions are MIT and BSD projects which both predate the Free Software and Open Source movements.
on other words, developers always had the ability to do stuff in their free time regardless of the license. those that live in countries that allow employers to own everything had to fight their employers to be allowed to do so, and they still have to do that. the cases where employees are getting paid to work on Free Software or Open Source are rare, although they are less rare today than in the past because more companies release their sources. but again, this was not the goal at the founding. at least not that this should help the developers. the goal was always to support and protect the users, to allow them to share and modify the software they use.
My understanding is that the purpose of Stallman's free software movement is "that the users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software." The FSF is focused on "defending the rights of all software users." Its about the users, not the developers.
That's just the main idea, but also:
1. LLMs make existing software (even obscure stuff, so long it fits in the context window) more intelligible:
- how do you compile this (when you are inexperienced and the ecosystem of that language is a baroque mess, it might seem impossible)?
- what does this error message mean?
- what parameters do I need to use in my invocation to get it to do XYZ?
- what does this function do? why does it use this algorithm?
2. They also make new software easier to write, and existing software easier to modify:
- ask about anything concerning the part of source code that fits in a context window, and you'll get a (probably correct) explanation of what it does, faster than a half-dead IRC channel or StackOverflow would respond
- the above, but also: the LLM has infinite patience and can drill down as deep as you want. You can ask "OK, but why?" for as long as you want, as about anything you want. You might get a hallucinated answer sometimes, but a frustrated human who would be asked the same way, could also just make something up to shut you up.
- for anything in the context window, ask about how to go about making a functionality change to add or modify a feature
- the above, but if it's small enough, just get the LLM to write the change for you. It might be buggy and messy, but you'll be one step ahead if you lack the skill to make the change yourself
- how do I set up the build chain? Why is my compiler not picking up the path properly? Is the project directory structure wrong? This used to be a huge problem before LLMs, and relied on undocumented knowledge.
---
For me, the whole point of open source is ready-made, (hopefully) not too buggy components that I can use and customise as an end user, or plug into the thing I am building as a developer. LLMs make the freedom of FOSS become much more practical, particularly to those sympathetic to the movement but technically less experienced.
That won't work. The breaking of that model is far more widespread than one thinks because of how it was broken.
The breaking of the model breaks underlying models all the way down to the basis for economic distribution of labor.
Its a phase change where labor and expertise are free, without restriction and the people with that expertise do not receive economic benefit for it anymore. In short, your demand curves goes to 0 in that area. There may be a great need for something, but if the demand is 0 no one will fulfill that need. People aren't slaves. Many people conflate demand with need, Hayek in his economics in one book cover the distinction. TL;DR demand is the group of people where there is a point at which two parties are both willing to exchange something for something. Need is where no such crossection between the S/D curve in exchange can occur for the two parties involved. One is much smaller than the other, and at 0, it doesn't happen or you only get the efforts of slaves.
The trend is inevitably towards stalling the economic cycle, where such experts simply do not create such things, they do not share, the ones that could either abandon that expertise or they withdraw keeping it to themselves.
The vast majority of all action though is done for economic benefit, and when that's no longer the case people don't do it. People aren't slaves.
Only one item became a bit popular, but was written for MS-DOS ages ago and I hear it is still used by 1 person :)
I've released several tools, and for most of them, I've heard nothing from anyone.
But 3 got somewhat popular in their niche and most of the inquiries and requests were from people who seemed to think they were entitled to free support and feature requests. Many times, they got pretty rude if I refused to implement their feature or I took too long to release a fix.
It really turned me off from releasing open source code and then interacting with users. I'd rather just release the code, and forget about it, only patching on my own terms.
I didn't try to release code again until the end of my PhD.
When I did veer into enterprise environments, I regretted the NDAs I signed. It was annoying to later want to share some illustrative anecdotes but have to censor myself. And it wasn't like they were state secrets, just stuff that was amusing and apropos but someone might be able to trace back to the NDA contract period due to the small world we seem to inhabit.
Otherwise, I've been in university-linked R&D and generally went with folks who declared projects open source before we began any real effort on it. That's the only way to be sure.
As a result, I became network troubleshooting tech support for a large chunk of people trying to run kubernetes on bare metal. If you've not looked at k8s's networking, debugging even your own cluster's networking is a nightmare, never mind debugging someone else's over slack, while (usually) simultaneously having to give them a crash course in intermediate/advanced networking stuff like asymmetric routing and tracing packets through netfilter so that you can then tell them that networks can't do the thing they wanted and no amount of new features I can add will change that.
Meanwhile companies selling bare metal k8s services started bundling MetalLB, but kept sending their customers to my bugtracker instead of taking some of the load themselves.
The experience burned me out severely. It's been several years and I still have a visceral negative reaction to the idea of open-sourcing code I wrote, and when I infrequently do they come with a fairly blunt "contributions no welcome" message and a disabled issue tracker. I handed over the keys to MetalLB a long while back now. I hope the new maintainers and the project are doing okay.
I'll mention a positive of that time as well, to balance it out: as an experiment I opened a pinned issue asking happy users to drop me a note (https://github.com/metallb/metallb/issues/5), and many did. It was nice occasionally getting a notification that wasn't a complaint or demand for support. At one point someone left me a note that it was being used to support research projects at NASA JPL and DARPA. That was pretty neat.
And if it's not that, it's someone (who very well may be qualified) being unnecessarily passive aggressive trying to make a failure of your own seem like a show stopping nightmare that they'd never let happen.
What I really don't like is that sharing anecdotes like the above often invites equally annoying "tHaT's NoT mY eXpErIeNcE" type comments which leads to a sort of "who cares, just do the best you can and ignore everybody" mindset (which can be helpful at times, damaging at others).
Aside from all of that nonsense, it's great because you have other sets of eyes looking around that may see something you didn't. This is incredibly valuable if you're a soloist or small team working on a big project.
I now caution everyone who talks about open-sourcing their projects to consider which groups might feel that the existence of the proposed project represents an attack against them and what threat those groups may pose when they dedicate themselves to your removal.
That aside, have had two other projects take off and get flooded with normies demanding things on social media/github. I now do each under throwaway names and sell them to people who want the appearance of having shipped
I guess it really depends on how popular your project gets. I have no idea if my stuff is used or not[1], so regretting is maybe kinda hard?
I’ll keep doing it, though. Might regret it at some point, but I get so much value out of open source, it feels wrong not to.
[1]: Judging by the lack of patches I’d guess my work isn’t used, though.
Now I frequently find myself building things and thinking "damn, wish I could use that to make my life easier".
I'm keeping the details vague because I think I'm still bound by NDAs.
But in principle I agree that it would behoove profitable companies who benefit from FOSS to either pay or contribute.
That said, a few entities are advocating for something like this, e.g. Bruce Perens with Post Open (https://postopen.org) or FUTO with "source first" (https://www.futo.org/about/futo-statement-on-opensource/).
A big hangup with all of this is, who is "us"? Whom do you owe money to?
The original author? What if I end up forking the software without the original authors involved, am I going to do it for free with all the proceeds going to people who aren't working on it anymore?
Or all future contributors? Using which formula to divvy up that money? Lines of code, useful bug reports written, number of tasks triaged, number of tasks resolved, documentation authored, users supported - what determines the relative amount of your contribution? Who receives the payment(s) from $megacorp, can they be trusted to redistribute it among contributors? What happens when the original maintainer / payment receiver steps back or scales back their contributions? How to avoid the divvy-up metric being gamed by people who care more about the money than the quality of the software?
Yes, it's possible; no, "just add to the license" doesn't cut it. This is a much bigger question. How you answer these questions determines whether your project even preserves open source's main (user-side) benefit of forkability.
Otherwise I'd just keep my packages private.
Sometimes, a project or an idea is bigger than just a single human or company. So keeping everything only for ourselves is a very narrow strategy.
By openly sharing the knowledge, we can pass the sparks to future generations. Including future versions of ourselves after we die and get reincarnated.
That said, I feel like things could have worked out better given how much time I invested beforehand and how everything had been clicking into place until my 5 year plan fell apart suddenly around the time of COVID. It all went perfectly until the very end when other people's irrationality and corruption ruined everything.
I probably won't be open sourcing my more innovative recent work. I'd want to see traction before I open source that one and I'm not convinced that open sourcing would make a difference in terms of getting traction.
When something could benefit from being open sourced, it's kind of obvious.
I think if I hadn't open sourced that other project, it would have gotten me nowhere and I would have gotten no value out of it so that was definitely the right move.
My more recent work is a serverless platform. I really wish I could open source it. It's probably better than anything else of its kind but I'm not convinced that people would understand the value provided because you have to use it for at least 1 hour to have your mind blown... But I can't convince people to invest 1 hour into trying it. Big chicken and egg problem.
Also, my understanding of business is that it doesn't make sense to offer a product whose quality exceeds people's perception limits. Outside of the luxury sector, nobody will pay for surplus value which they cannot fully sense, not even if it's 'free'; they won't invest their time. Also, my target audience are developers and they often like using suboptimal, time-consuming tools which allow them to do busy-work. They charge by the hour after all. It's like the target audience is communist so it's stupid to look at them through a capitalist free-market lens.
I've been told there were too many RCE exploits on all of the software I made, but the reporter didn't specify what software has the exploits (could be anything from my personal website, my forum, my link sharing site, my fangame, to my discord bot; they didn't specify). And even though I did get attacked by spam on my own forum, I made a workaround for it and it worked.
Since then I've been making proprietary software only, but distribution is harder this way (at least for me).
They're both about understanding of statistics at their heart. But in vastly different ways.
The first is my first set of amateur Rust projects. They're built around a Covid-Era project to reverse engineer the LucasArts SCUMM games, specifically Loom on the Atari ST. It was a fun project that led me through Atari STX disks to FAT file systems to SCUMM virtual machines.
And a few side projects along the way with CRC32, Adler-32, Fletcher and flawed checksum algorithms. Including using a kolmogorov-smirnov test to show issues with Adler32 on small data sizes.
I use the math, and it's a great project to learn about hypothesis testing and polynomials. But I can't explain it all. Just enough to be dangerous.
And the APIs are shit.
But it's out there and it was fun.
The second isn't really code. It's a comment somewhere about Microsoft and Valve and purposefully designing systems like UEFI for political purposes before the "What the fuck is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care" issue struck.
It was about how these large-scale global political and standards wars hurt normal developers, even if in the end they will help others.
But I mentioned dead eyes because I was talking about exhaustion and just going along with trends instead of fighting back.
My comment might have been construed as violence against women. It wasn't in any way. As I go through CT and fMRI tests into the future we can show that it's not always what it seems on the surface.
But it is my fault. It was a stupid mistake that wasnt thinking about imagery in a larger context. Statistics shoes violence against women is a bigger issue, and that's the truth.
So, I'm sorry.
In terms of software we usually used Apache 2.0, LGPL, and GPL licenses.
Anecdotes:
1. FOSS e-Commerce tax module for merchant account gateway was resold as commercial software to several local businesses by a "startup". Didn't care until years later when we started getting spammed with support requests given the original email was in the source, and the "startup" had moved on to other ventures.
2. Wrote industrial drivers for integrated manufactured equipment, and due to remote locations it was important service people could modify/rebuild the open code as needed. We tracked prototype product GPS telemetry to a Singapore University campus, and saw a copy of the GUI at a trade show the following year. No more FOSS in commercial releases.
3. Built generic 3D printing hardware for our local club activities, and within a few months it was a product on Aliexpress. The problem was it was the Beta firmware design, and again people that paid for something that was supposed to be free get irate about support.
4. Built a small OS distro for Ham radio, EE, ROS, CNC, and 3D printing. Of the 8000 users only 2 people provided any sort of participation in maintaining the build. Also, many people were paranoid there was some sort of nefarious purpose even when meeting them in real life. “Free as in free beer” tends to make people suspicious in real life.
5. Tried to expand existing FOSS software, but get ghosted by the community when trying to learn about their code (stare into the void of ambiguous documentation.) Most FOSS communities are great, but some people just don't want to know about you or your silly problems. Better off with your own project fork version specific to a use-case, and share under a similar hands-off library support model.
6. Built custom FOSS IT infrastructure, and had publishers switch licenses years later. Makes people look like fools when a certain now well known vendor cold-call solicits a $8k support fee for something they probably broke on purpose 2-weeks prior. Re-wrote it in 3 weeks, and never exposed core systems to a “trust me bro” crowd again.
7. Took a few foundation courses to clear up the WTF deprecated vestigial garbage moments in the kernel source. Realized the value proposition is just not worth the perpetual Beta and political hassles. Started writing my own toy kernel that is just as odd as the hardware it is meant to run on, as traditional architecture problems just do not handle parallelism cleanly. Don’t ask, seriously… lol
8. Tried financial & bug support for other small FOSS projects we think are cool, but around 60% of the time projects are abandoned/EOL within 2 years. Building a user base around that is impossible.
I am sure there are some folks that fair much better, but in general most FOSS problems I saw are economic and or political… from a technical perspective Open source has proven more reliable than most commercial options.
Thus, prefer FOSS projects that serve your specific needs first, write something that fits your own use-case if you must, and expect zero community support unless your team lucks out. YMMV =3
Firstly your appeal to authority , and then using Steve Ballmer as your authority is perhaps not the best way to start.
Secondly you say that "no professional programmer" - but the statement is false. For starters it's a sweeping generalization which is trivial to show is untrue for at least 1 programmer.
Thirdly the existence of Open Source alternatuve does not make a product uncompetitive. You need look no further than Windows to see that's true. Indeed if we has to list all the commercial software that exists with an Ooen Source clone, we'd be here all day. I'd also argue that Joe public doesn't even know what open source is, much less factors it into a buying decision.
If you are building tools for programmers (already a tiny niche target market) then you need a hook other than Open Source anyway, cause programmers are a terrible target market.
I say this as someone who builds tools for programmers, and who sells commercial into a space that contains Open Source alternatives. And I do ok.