Open source is usually seen as a win - for learning, visibility, and the community. But have you ever regretted it?
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.
https://grell.dev/blog/ai_rejection
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".
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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.
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!)
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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.
It’s pretty typical of the alpha-nerd type who derives a ton of their self worth from superiority in some arcane area.
I'm writing such harsh words when I expect 0 improvement from the company but I hope at least to make the customer support person reconsider their life choices and quit the evil company
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.
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(The main example of these people was a guy named Erik Naggum, but a few still exist somewhere out there and I met one on a programming reddit yesterday. You can spot them because they won't stop telling you how great Lisp Machines are, can't explain why nobody uses them, and for some reason they insist on calling JavaScript "ECMAScript".)
That said, I also remember that codes of conduct were popularized about a decade ago by someone who was then fired from GitHub for harassing junior programmers (she claimed this was "mentoring" and seemed mentally incapable of noticing something could be wrong with her behavior.) So it seemed like an obvious case of reputation laundering at the time.
Still, I really don't think most people need to be told not to tell other people to kill themselves, and in many places where I hung out when I was younger I strongly believe you would have been tempbanned for "flaming". I was a forum moderator and I can tell you I would not have hesitated.
But you said the magic words, so it bears addressing; I think we all get the picture that the Code of Conduct drama usually doesn't have much to do with the actual rules that are contained within, which really aren't that controversial on their face, but rather the way in which power is moved from stakeholders within a project to other people by virtue of initiatives like establishing Code of Conducts and the governance structures that enforce them. And, I think most people will probably not get upset over the idea that telling someone else to go kill themselves might get you suspended from a discussion forum... Rather, the drama comes in when you see the reach of a project or organization's CoC start to extend outward past what people actually want to stop (toxic, unproductive communication) and past the edges of the project (and into policing the rest of the Internet.) Two notable examples I'd cite are Python with Tim Peters (who as far as anyone can tell genuinely didn't do anything wrong) and Freedesktop.org with Vaxry (who can be a bit immature, but is primarily accused of not moderating the Hyprland Discord... Which is a fair complaint about the Hyprland Discord, but not a very good reason for him to be banned from Freedesktop.org.)
Of course, truthfully, there is no 100% winning answer here; if the stakeholders who have control over a project by virtue of being the original developers don't want to cede any control to people for CoC enforcement, they don't really have to (although in reality, external pressures to implement one might make it an untenable position to hold.) In that case, you have to rely on those people to hold themselves accountable to reasonable conduct, and nobody's perfect. It's kind of like when police departments conduct internal investigations and find no problems; even if you're pretty pro-police, you must feel somewhat skeptical that they actually were reasonably impartial in conducting said investigation.
But, I generally side with The Evil I Know, which is that the project authors and biggest stakeholders should generally maintain most of the power and control in an open source project including the ultimate decisions regarding moderation. In cases where developers have proven particularly egregious with their conduct, forking has proven to be effective enough as a mitigation strategy, and the fact that it comes at a cost is a sort of feature, as it's better if a power shift like that isn't easy; while I can't guarantee that the original authors and maintainers of a project will act reasonably and impartially, I can at least say that I expect them to have the project's best interests at heart, whereas the kinds of people that go around looking for established projects and organizations to join roles that have authority tend to not be the kinds of people you usually want in those roles. Having it be difficult means you need people who genuinely care about the project rather than the types of people who just kind of seek power. (And I am sorry, but there are fuckloads of those people among us and they are absolutely dirty enough to hide under the guise of anything to get a modicum of control. Running an online community for any appreciable amount of time opens your eyes to this IMO.)
All of this to say, it reflects poorly on the state of the Internet at the time and KDE's mailing lists that the situation happened and was possibly not rectified in a way that is satisfactory (it sure doesn't sound like it.) The correct thing to do is obviously to issue a ban, and you don't need a rule book of any kind to figure that out. I think when people push for these things during major incidents, it's misguided at best, because usually the core problem was not that a "don't tell people to kill each other" rule didn't exist, but that people actually would've needed such a rule to decide the behavior was unacceptable in the first place. This isn't some complex gray area case. I don't think people are acting in bad faith when they suggest it as an option after a drama incident, but I still think it's the wrong knee jerk 99% of the time.
(The most favorable thing I can say is that I think a CoC might possibly have value in very large projects like Linux or Kubernetes, but so far the execution has always felt like it leaves something to be desired. Seeing people occasionally openly threaten to contact the CoC committees over effectively technical disagreements leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)
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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)_/¯
I'd be more than happy to put you in touch - email address in my profile if you're interested.
I was told I should just ignore the error messages I was seeing. When I kept asking, some of the most active members started insulting and ridiculing me. Then others started joining in.
The only thing I had in mind was to improve the guide for other people new to arch, that came after me. Instead, I was only insulted and ridiculed. I uninstalled Arch and never did anything with it again. The toxicity of that community still makes me angry today.
I was confused while reading because I nearly only ever use su to switch to the superuser account and obviously to get root permissions you should be root or else it's a security issue. Looking up what su does on FreeBSD, I was reminded that it can switch to any user. I've actually used that before. You made that? :o
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.
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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.
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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.
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!
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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.