Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

Steve Ballmer nailed it when he said GPL is a cancer. No professional programmer wants to open source anything, but once one competitor does it, he must follow suit to stay competitive.

>Maybe it became a burden to maintain,

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.

i was asked for a third party lib exemption licence, i asked for a sweetener...no, they couldn't even answer me after that

I regret open sourcing my reverse engineering of Obsidian Sync. I did it mostly for personal use but thought it might be useful for others. After a bit of cat and mouse, they fixed all the "vulnerabilities" that let you change the sync and publish endpoints and now I'm still stuck using a very outdated version. I recently found another way to get it working on IOS again but definitely not publishing it.

I've open sourced a few things in the past that I wish I could have kept closed source for monetization purposes. Probably a failure of some imagination on my part, but also, it's really hard to make and sell good desktop software if a user can make their own for free by typing `make`.

No

I tried to open source a weekend personal project while at $BIGCO via their "Invention Assignment Review Committee". It turned into a minor bureaucratic nightmare and I was ultimately never given the OK to release it, or any clarity over whether my employer was choosing to assert an IP ownership interest in it. In retrospect, I wish I had never notified them of its existence, and released it under a pseudonym instead.

I wrote a small app to display a bitrate graph of video files, and posted the code on GitHub with the GPL2 license. A few weeks later someone uploaded it to the Mac App Store and sold it for 7$, the only difference was the name.

Not the OP, but I have a similar dilemma. I'm currently sitting on a SOTA ML model for a particular niche. I'm trying to figure whether I should try selling it to the incumbents (in some shape or form), or if I should publish a paper on the techniques, and/or if I should OSS it.

I regret it only from the perspective that it opens you up to noise from smarmy, entitled, often wildly under-qualified developers trying to "get you" for not knowing something or not having some feature they claim is table stakes.

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.

Here is one such story of regret for paint.net (not my project but I'm a fan). I think the author's take was quite reasonable for this project.

https://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paint...

Got death threats because I wasn't prioritizing stuff people were requesting, said nah I'm done

About 10 years ago I was on a contract sabbatical from the usual job and the customer at the time open sourced part of the product with the wrong license, a competitor forked it and made a superior product, undercut them and took all of their customers. They had enough capital to buy the competitor but it was an extremely expensive mistake. I'm not sure they ever broke even.

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 did "open source" my static site generator. No forks, no stars, no PRs. I removed it from github since the only one who's taking advantage of it is probably Microsoft.

Yup.

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.

Never regretted. But my "things" are far from earth shattering and most have now have better alternatives.

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 regret open sourcing an offline patch I made for an Unreal Engine 3 game. The game was unplayable due to an always online backend that got shut down, but was still being sold so I required everyone buy a license to play with my mod. I had to reimplement stock UE3 netcode, and a bunch of other really cool stuff. Someone who was mad at me for not giving them more help when they struggled to develop on my software decided to "repack" my software and the game on a popular piracy site, both violating my AGPL license and increasing the risk that the whole project gets CnDd. I guess it's funny that a project violating a companies "no reverse engineering" clause is pissed that someone violated their OSS license, but such is life :D

I wrote a network security tool (if you can call a glorified shell script that) and it was used by script kiddies to harass people.

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.

The purpose of Stallman’s open source movement was 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. (An experience I’m sure almost everyone here is familiar with, since we’ve all spent some years on proprietary systems).

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.

I open source pretty much everything I work on that is close to finished or finished. Never regretted doing it, but never got anything out of doing it either, aside from the feeling of paying forward.

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.

To some extent, yes.

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.

When I was ~14 I open sourced a script to autoconfigure X11's xrandr. It was pretty lousy, had several bugs. I mentioned it on a KDE mailing list and a KDE core contributor told me it was embarrassing code and to kill myself. I took it pretty hard and didn't contribute to KDE or X11 ever again, probably took me about a year to build up the desire to code again.

Everything else I've open-sourced has gone pretty well, comparatively.

I don't know -- maybe.

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 am the maintainer of a library to simulate keyboard and mouse input. I didn't start the project but took over the maintenance and have since rewritten pretty much all of the code. I recently found out that Anthropic is shipping it in Claude Desktop for some unreleased feature which is probably like "Computer Use". I noticed they had an open position in exactly the team responsible for the implementation and applied. A few months later I received a rejection. The letter said that the team doesn't have the time to review any more candidates. The code is under MIT so everything is perfectly fine. It is great that a company like Anthropic is using my code, but it would have been nice to benefit from it. I wrote a slightly longer blog post about the topic here:

https://grell.dev/blog/ai_rejection

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