Ask HN: Have you regretted making something open-source? - haydenlee
======
sheetjs
We build open source tools for processing spreadsheet data
([https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx](https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx) is
our largest and most popular open source project). Our open source tools have
been used by government agencies, S&P 500/Dow companies, and startups alike.
We've found people have taken the library, removed header comments, and sold
as-is. Some startups have taken our web demo
[http://oss.sheetjs.com/](http://oss.sheetjs.com/), replaced the name with
their own, and tried to use that to raise money. But those aren't really
regrettable -- it's written off as "shameless people are shameless".

The truth is, you can never really know what would have happened if you didn't
open source in the first place. Would an open source alternative emerge? Would
people pay for your project or would it die in relative obscurity? That's
unknowable.

If there's any regret, it's probably the amount of time spent doing support
work for the open source libraries. It's not particularly interesting (usually
pertaining to something in the README), time consuming (everyone seems to have
their own secret project that they don't want to discuss, so you have to draw
out the underlying issue slowly), and uncompensated.

~~~
beckler
I've discovered that "shameless people are shameless" is surprisingly common.
I stumbled across a site for a new JS book one day, and it looked exactly like
the personal site of one of our frontend developers. I asked him if he started
selling his site as a template, and he goes pale. About 15 minutes later we
found where someone had lifted all the assets off his site, replaced his name
and photo, and put it up for sale on ThemeForest. Didn't even remove all the
comments he left in the code. Dude was making about $2k a month with it. He
ended up having to send him a cease and desist, and the guy only gave him
about $3k as a settlement.

~~~
sheetjs
The comment wasn't intended to be diminutive. There happen to be many
shameless people looking to make a quick buck, but few of those people would
pay if you didn't open source in the first place (or if you offered them a
chance to purchase a commercial license). Even with your coworker, the only
reason he received money was because the offender made a lot more from it.

~~~
nitrogen
It's probably a good thing that people maintain a disdain for freeloading,
though. It's important for at least some of the gains from a new creation to
go to the creator, otherwise the market for whatever product will stagnate
because the people with resources are not the people with ideas.

~~~
quickthrower2
Freeloading but also copyright violation. No different to selling a cracked
Windows installer.

------
_wmd
Throwing random code over the wall is fairly harmless, until it sees any level
of popularity, at which point you become the sole point of contact for a sea
of people expecting bug fixes for free. That can be rewarding, but it can also
be intensely draining.

Imagine looking at your personal inbox giving you the same feeling of dread as
you'd expect looking at your work inbox after being off for a few weeks..

I'm currently trying to offload one project because it's getting too much, and
just finding a new maintainer who knows C and Python to a decent standard has
turned out difficult. None of the regular project users have stepped up.
Shrugs

~~~
erikb
Exactly this experience happens in big teams internally as well.

It works like this according to my experience: You see a problem before it
really does financial harm to the company. You start developing a solution.
You expect to get rewarded with prices, raises, titles and public
encouragement, because you solved the problem before anybody even saw it.

But instead this will happen: The employees who run into the problem first and
therefore would be the one who suffer from it, find that your solution may be
an answer. But instead of making it work they find ways to complain about it
publicly. Since management hasn't yet realized that there is a problem, they
just hear that you are not doing your job and put pressure on you to fix all
the bugs, because of your bugs nobody else can work, so it seems.

This is not stupid by the other people or by accident. The moment they have
found a way to complain about you it doesn't matter anymore if the task will
be successful or not, since a failure wouldn't be blamed on them anymore as
well. Everybody knows that the bugs are your fault, right?

In this regard open source seems less harmful to me. In open source at least
there is no boss who can push you to solve the bugs, or fire you if you don't.

~~~
icebraining
Companies are generally hierarchical systems. By developing the solution on
your own initiative, you bypassed that. You should never expect a good
reaction from a social system when you break its rules, even if for its own
benefit.

~~~
cname
One thing that's so confounding about this is that so many hierarchical
organizations (companies, non-profits, universities, etc) encourage
"initiative", but then when you take that initiative, you may/often catch shit
for it, even if you're doing the right thing from an objective point of view.
Of course, there are complex politics at play and the reaction you get depends
on largely on "who you know" and if you effectively kiss ass.

~~~
icebraining
There was a semi-famous author in my city who did that on a personal level: he
would ask his friends to keep part of his paycheck until a certain day, and
not give it to him even if he asked, since he knew he'd misspend it all (often
by just being generous to friends and people in need).

More than once, not only did he ask for the money before the date, as upon
being denied, he went around in coffeeshops and bars defaming them, telling
people they'd stolen from him, etc.

If even individuals can be this inconsistent, we shouldn't be surprised that
companies - composed of multiple private interests, as many as their employees
and board members - exhibit similar behaviors.

~~~
_e
It is like a gambling addict who enrolls themself voluntarily on a gambling
ban list and then does everything possible to get back into the casino.

~~~
corobo
I once enabled noprocrast here, that was hell

------
symisc_devel
Not regretting it, but open sourcing our embedded PHP engine PH7[1] did hurt
our sales (I think) when some Chinese company started abusing the software by
embedding it in their hardware without paying any license fee (The software is
dual licensed and require a commercial license for closed source code). I have
a indirect proof of that abuse but starting a lawsuit against a Chinese co
won't lead to any result?

[1]: [https://github.com/symisc/ph7](https://github.com/symisc/ph7)

~~~
kerneldeveloper
In China, open source licenses don't have any legal effect, so it's hard to
safeguard legal rights. In recent years some open source organizations have
been founded and they hope their efforts can change the environment of open
source in China. However, there is still a long way to go.

~~~
oliwarner
Could you expand on that?

China's laws implement the Berne Convention, making copyright automatic.

Open source licenses usually provide conditional exceptions to that automatic
and internationally accepted copyright.

So if they don't believe in open source licenses, or whatever, "all rights
reserved" is logically the default fallback.

That obviously doesn't marry with what you said. China is famously awful at
upholding IP laws they're party to, but I think that's all this is here. It's
still against the law there, but nobody cares if it's not hurting China.

~~~
Joeri
Once enough chinese companies rely on IP laws to protect their assets things
will change. It's like how the U.S. book publishing industry played fast and
loose with copyright as long as the books were british but pushed for stronger
copyright once there were enough american authors.

~~~
xiaoma
I've been encountering that claim for 20 years. In that time, the Chinese
software ecosystem has grown more than any other in the world and might even
be larger than that of any other country at this point.

How many companies relying on IP laws is "enough" for foreign IP to be taken
seriously?

~~~
catmanjan
Those companies don't rely on international IP laws so much as laws inside
China. When you start seeing Chinese companies actually competing via tenders
that's when they'll start caring.

------
mholt
I think I regret making Papa Parse[1] open source under the MIT license,
anyway. Turns out it became incredibly popular and I missed a lot of
opportunities to make a profit on the side. But it is used by government
agencies around the world, and non-profit organizations like the UN and
Wikimedia, so at least it's doing some good. But I know quite a few large
businesses are using it at the core of their products... for free. Oh well. It
was fun to build.

[1] [http://papaparse.com](http://papaparse.com)

~~~
pmtarantino
I understand your feeling, but I used it in a startup I work for. As I was
responsible for this feature (customers uploading their csv files), with PP I
did this task in half a day when it could have took me a few days. I told this
to my boss and I asked him to donate to PP from the company, but I never heard
about it again, so I will ask him again on Monday.

Thanks again for this library.

~~~
mholt
See, I love hearing stuff like this (but also am sad for the realities of
donations from companies). Thanks for your comment!

~~~
abeyer
Donations from companies are notoriously difficult to push through for any but
the smallest/newest companies. Any more established ones tend to have rules
and bureaucracy built up around the process of making donations (if they do at
all), and individuals within usually have little direct influence.

Paying license fees for tools or software, on the other hand, is commonplace
enough that small amounts are usually at a manager's discretion with little
oversight. Offering to send an invoice for a 'license' that doesn't offer any
additional benefits may be a way to simplify things for companies like this
that want to pay to support the open source they use.

~~~
tajen
I second this: Open-source projects, please send invoices so companies can
bury them in their accounting. Even postgresql.org let me down with a "the
only invoice is the CC receipt from paypal", which triggered a specific
discussion with my accountant about the legal limits of donations (France).

------
erikb
The opposite. In my country it's really hard to get any ownership of your
content if you are an employee. For instance you work as secretary for a
bodyguard company and in your private time lead a pop-rock band. It's not
impossible that your boss can grab a share of your music earnings.

In this regard open-source is really helpful, because it enables me to write
code in one gig that is good enough to earn my pay there, but allows me in a
legal way to use the same code in my next gig. Instead of giving my boss
monopoly over my long-term viable content, I make it free to everybody and
therefore useful to my future self.

I would even argue it's good for the boss too, since this way I am more
motivated to produce, and 90% of the code used in production is totally
useless once the author is gone, since most developers aren't good enough to
reuse preexisting code and will instead start writing their own code from
scratch.

~~~
sverige
> For instance you work as secretary for a bodyguard company and in your
> private time lead a pop-rock band. It's not impossible that your boss can
> grab a share of your music earnings.

What country is this? I can't imagine such a scenario outside of a serfdom.

~~~
adekok
In the US, it's possible for your employer to own your ideas:

[http://www.salon.com/2004/08/18/evan_brown/](http://www.salon.com/2004/08/18/evan_brown/)

Follow-up:

[https://everything2.com/title/The+Thoughts+of+Evan+Brown](https://everything2.com/title/The+Thoughts+of+Evan+Brown)

Solution: never disclose anything to your employer unless absolutely required.
If you have a new idea, keep it quiet until you quit your job.

FTA:

 _(After 5 1 /2 years of litigation, Judge Curt B. Henderson of Collin County,
Texas' 219th District Court ruled in favor of Alcatel, and Brown was obliged
to fully disclose the idea to Alcatel and only Alcatel, and to repay in full
Alcatel's legal fees of more than $330,000, which according to Brown forced
him to sell his house and other assets._

 _During the court case, Brown argued that since his idea had never been
committed to paper or physically manifested in any way, there were no grounds
for the company to claim ownership of his very thoughts, and he drew
comparisons to the fact that an invention cannot be copyrighted or patented
until it is transferred from an idea onto paper._

He didn't handle his case well, which torpedoed it. But in parts of the US,
yes... anything you do during the course of your employment is owned by the
employer.

As a contractor, I've been asked to sign contracts with similar clauses. Uh...
no. I have other customers, and you don't own what _they_ pay me to do. Their
typical counter is "But this is a standard clause".

Telling them to "no contract" is usually the only option. They just can't
understand why an entirely one-sided contract isn't good for _me_.

~~~
sverige
I agree with what you are saying, particularly about 1) Evan Brown making his
own case weak, and 2) not signing such contracts where it is bad for your
business. The articles were valuable - thanks!

This is different, though, from the case where you are employed as a secretary
for a bodyguard company and then work as a musician outside of your regular
employment, isn't it?

I mean, suppose Adele was the secretary and then started her musical career
during that time. Would the bodyguard company be entitled to royalties from
her catalog? I don't think so, and I don't think this case says they would
either.

~~~
adekok
> This is different, though, from the case where you are employed as a
> secretary for a bodyguard company and then work as a musician outside of
> your regular employment, isn't it?

Not really. If the contract states they own _everything_ you do while you're
employed by them, they really do own everything.

As for Adele, she's British. Such clauses are generally null and void in the
English Common Law system. Your employer owns what they pay you do to, and
what you create using employer tools. But if you work as a computer
programmer, and invent a better mousetrap at home, your employer can't claim
ownership of the mousetrap.

~~~
sverige
Are you saying if it were Madonna instead of Adele, then some bodyguard
company owner could be retired in Costa Rica on his earnings from "Papa Don't
Preach" if Madonna had signed such a contract when she started working there
as a secretary? Is it contractual only? (OP seemed to indicate that it was any
employment, so I'm still wondering what country this might be.)

------
repomies6999
While I don't regret it, last experiences with open source probably made me to
not do it again. Essentially people seemed to assume that if I release a
project, it also means that I'm require to provide free support for it, etc.
The attitude from users of the software was depressing - in fact to me it
feels that my paying customers are nicer on average.

~~~
rhlala
Pretty sad comment.. I though the vast majority of open-source users were
devs...

~~~
shimo5037
At first most of your users tend to be fairly advanced. After all, they've
even managed to somehow find the obscure thing you've made. This is the most
rewarding time for an open source project as many of the issues are real and
the quality of bug reports and feedback is extremely high. Over time, as the
project gains popularity, many of these issues will either have been solved,
or have become easily googlable. Therefore you'll rarely hear from the
advanced, intelligent portion of your users, although it's also certainly
possible that they've already moved on to shinier things.

In the end, you tend to have a noticeable, vocal portion of users whom I'd
generously call "social developers," who are bad at figuring things out by
themselves and/or prefer asking things from another person to save a few
minutes of their own time. Many of these users are very draining to deal with.

------
marenkay
Definitely: the software for running World of Warcraft private servers, also
known as MaNGOS.

Founded and released that in 2005, got so much trouble because of that and
wasted loads of cash to keep up project through numerous DDoS attacks, hacks
(one of them even causing github downtime in 2013).

oh well. Next :-)

~~~
sturmen
I had no idea it was so taxing, but I do want to let you know that MaNGOS is
probably what set me on a path of learning programming (which has become my
career) so I am indebted to you.

~~~
marenkay
Always nice to hear it had some of the intended effects. The - albeit ideal -
project goal always was to inspire people to learn development and engage with
more complex issues.

------
_Marak_
I released an open-source universal cryptocurrency banking website in 2013
called "Safewallet". It has decent google ranking for SEO terms related to
open-source crypto banking.

Every time the price of Bitcoin goes up I start getting emails from
wantrepreneurs asking me to essentially work for them without pay because they
"have a great idea" and "just need a little help getting the software
working". During Bitcoin mania phases ( like now ) I'll get 2-3 of these
emails a month.

Too many stories to list. Everything ranging from offers of $2,000 to build a
"BitStamp clone" or the time I was suppose to be having a sales call with the
CEO and instead was greeted by their lead engineer with an endless list of
questions on how they could build their own cryptocurrency bank. CEO got real
nasty when I politely informed him they would have to pay me for my expert
advice.

They all want something for nothing and get an attitude when I tell them I'm
not going to build them their own cryptocurrency bank for free or for minimal
pay.

Regret spending so much time on something which has only brought me grief.

see:
[https://github.com/bigcompany/safewallet](https://github.com/bigcompany/safewallet)

~~~
sumedh
There is something wrong with your domain or someone is trying to mess with
you. I see this when I opened the site

safewallet.org Please update your contact information

~~~
_Marak_
I gave up on the project and let the domain lapse. Turns out I'm not very
interested in running a bank.

------
bane
I can't get into details, but I worked at a place that was thinking about
opening up some development for open source publishing. Another team was
working on some very high-end algorithmic work in a specialized field and the
company was pumping lots of money into internal R&D for that group. They were
selected as an open source test case.

They pushed up their code to github and within a few months a group of them
had left the company to form a boot-strapped competitor using their same code
-- essentially using the open source publication of their tools as a way to
legally ex-filtrate corporate IP -- a nightmare scenario for many companies
(and also recently in the news i.e. Uber v Waymo).

This one act burned all open source publishing plans to the ground and now
that company open sources as little software as possible. Now, several years
later, they haven't published a single line of open source code that I'm aware
of.

~~~
cannam
One reason why a GPL licence can be a good idea for businesses -- and BSD/MIT
a good idea for employees.

~~~
noobermin
But GPL is bad mmkay, Apple told me so.

Seriously, I'm not surprised people haven't thought to take advantage of this
aspect of GPL for their own selfish benefit. It's only when you're someone
like Apple where BSD or MIT or any of the "permissive" licenses make sense for
you, that or you really want to be self-less.

------
christocracy
I made an open source lib for Cordova (eventually ported to React Native and
others). I found I'd gained a number of users with few contributing back, so I
forked my own project, closed the source into compiled and encrypted binaries.
Now I sell licenses and support, generating ~$20k/month. Innovation has
skyrocketed since I've been able to dedicate 100% of my time to the products
for the last 2.5 years.

~~~
thomastjeffery
How do you think it would have been if you stayed with the open project, and
just sold support?

~~~
christocracy
Well, what I tell customers is "what you're paying for _is_ support and latest
updates.

Customers get access to a private repo for latest updates and priority support
for 1 year (yearly maintenance fee = $150/year). ~20% of customers pay the
yearly.

Each purchased key is bound to a mobile app id. If customer wants to make 3
apps, they need to purchase 3 keys.

Public repo contains latest stable release; purchased keys unlock product in
public repo forever.

iOS lib is free. Only Android lib requires a key to unlock it. This gives
users the chance to freely develop iOS first (and hopefully get hooked, like
cheap crack ;). Chances are they're going to release an Android version too
since most of the earth uses Android.

The Android version is fully operational in DEBUG builds. Key is enforced for
RELEASE builds.

------
nathancahill
I maintain a mildly popular JS library on Github. I learned early on to be
upfront that helping people with integrations costs me time.

I get a handful of emails each day requesting assistance. I direct them to the
README, Stackoverflow and this page:
[https://github.com/nathancahill/Split.js/wiki/Split.js-
Suppo...](https://github.com/nathancahill/Split.js/wiki/Split.js-Support)

This has worked out well, I've made money off of serious users and avoided a
lot of painful back and forth with people who don't want to share code.

------
devj
Lot of comments indicate that the code authors regret making their code open
source because somebody rebranded their code or sold it and made money.

You always had a choice to stop development in the early stages and: 1) Make
it proprietary - Why didn't you do it? 2) Have a commercial version - Why
didn't you do it? 3) Change the license from MIT/Apache/etc - Why didn't you
do it? 4) Charge for features/support/maintenance/etc - Why didn't you do it?

When you use certain OS licenses, you give the permission to its user to do
whatever they wish including selling it and therefore, complaining about it
later doesn't make any sense.

Mattermost for example, was APL. Then they changed it to AGPL because they
experienced something similar.

Gitea was born out of the frustration that the original code was not
maintained properly.

There are numerous examples like this.

So stop complaining and take action else embrace open source with all your
heart.

When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential
freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute
copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so
think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” These freedoms are vitally important.
They are essential, not just for the individual users' sake, but for society
as a whole because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and
cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life
activities are increasingly digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images,
and words, free software becomes increasingly essential for freedom in
general. \- Richard Stallman

------
Steeeve
I regret not making a good deal of software open source. But it's a tough
decision depending on your market.

One of the niches I specialized in was essentially taken over by an influx of
offshore resources. It's like going into bizzaro world when you go to a
meeting on a project and someone else is using your own powerpoint
presentation and is doing it wrong. It's offensive when you go through project
documentation and see that someone else has gotten paid for documents that you
wrote for another customer - especially when they are not current.

When I began experiencing this kind of thing, I felt confident in my decision
_not_ to open source software.

But the reality is that my biggest source of pride was given to the world at
large. And all these years later I would appreciate having a lot of code which
I no longer own in my portfolio. And while there are those who would have
poached and pillaged my work, my income would have been minimally affected (or
maybe not at all). The fact is that when I operated in that niche, the money I
earned was all due to the fact that I was good, not because of any particular
piece of software. Having a public portfolio of related software might have
even brought in more business.

------
KirinDave
Yes. I did horrible things at the start of clj-time in my fork. I was so
disgusted with my solution I abandoned it.

Those decisions got propagated and didn't get fixed for a long time. I should
have kept it closed and let someone else do it properly, rather than unless
abandonware on the world.

In fact, come to think of it, I regret everything I've ever open sourced. I
can't think of even one time it lead to a positive outcome. I can't think of
even one time it didn't lead to a decidedly negative outcome.

The same is true of my writing. Every time I've wrote about the advancements
of programming, people have made it their goal to oppose it and mock me over
it.

Lots of people love to talk about how great this community is. But I've never
seen our world as much more than a slowly spreading cloud of venom in a larger
medium of confusion. I've felt this way ever since the days when I was a kid
and the title "hacker" was rigorously gatekept in local and isolated
oligarchies.

~~~
nvivo
That was very pessimistic, but I can see some truth in it.

~~~
KirinDave
I don't understand why you'd find it "pessimistic."

Would it be more "optimistic" to ignore all the bad things this community has
done with and to me? That's not a thing I'm capable of doing.

I do the work because I love it. The community hasn't welcomed me in any non-
barbed way since the early 90s.

------
calpaterson
One pattern I have seen a few times is that a company develops some important
internal piece of software and then later the opens the source code (normally
motivated by the notion that other people will contribute to it - which they
rarely do).

What normally happens next that the company loses control of this software
which they probably didn't realise was so important to their core business as
the employees who worked on it are empowered move to other companies and
develop private forks or start up as a micro-ISV/contractor business based
around providing private forks of the software to clients.

I think what people don't realise is that most of the legal structure around
open source software is for software used by end-users. For internal software
the GPL doesn't function in the same way: other organisations are more than
able to keep private forks and realise all the benefit of the software without
contributing back.

------
neilk
I'm encountering difficulties right now with a project I open-sourced. Some
other people made it a core part of their business, but then I left the
company, so I can't merge patches to the official branch. And to be honest I
don't have the time to do this (I work for another growing startup).

But it's _still_ it's one of the best things I have ever done in computing. It
was fun, and I got paid to do a kind of pure research, and enhance my own
reputation while doing it. My former employer got free patches from very big
and talented companies. I've made some interesting connections through this,
that's for sure.

------
CJefferson
I have regretted using the GPL, twice.

First time I made a project I wrote myself (a CP solver called Minion) GPL. I
now know several companies had interest in it but we're afraid to put any GPL
in their toolchain. I've never received useful external contributions, so I
may as well have used BSD.

The second is a project I work on where GPL V2 was chosen. Now some committers
have passed away so we are stuck on 2, so can't link with other, GPL v3-only
code

~~~
mcguire
You didn't use the "GPLv2 or later" clause?

~~~
pm215
The Linux kernel is the most well known codebase that is specifically
GPL-2-only. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other 2-only codebases made
by people familiar with kernel development, either because they were
influenced by the kernel's choice or because they wanted to be able to use
code from the kernel. QEMU is in the latter boat -- we have code that was
copied from the kernel, so effectively we're GPL-2-only despite having a fair
amount of 2-or-later or BSD or other licensed source too. This is awkward
because we'd really like to be able to use the binutils disassemblers, but
we're stuck on the versions from the last GPL-2 binutils release...

------
prodicus
Nooo. Open source was always something I really believed in. I don't have
projects which are used by the masses, but the random thanks by a stranger
when he finds something I made and open sourced[1] as useful is priceless. But
that's just me.

[1]: [https://github.com/tasdikrahman/](https://github.com/tasdikrahman/)

------
byuu
As a whole, I'm much more happy that I did than if I hadn't.

Over the past 13 years, I've been developing console emulators for 12 systems
and counting. If my work were closed source, I would not have received patches
and contributions from 30+ people and counting. And I wouldn't have met
several amazing people who ended up becoming very good friends for a very long
time. One in particular has been amazing in helping me open up and be less
guarded all the time.

I was also able to sell one complete commercial license, and received a
partial payment for a license from another company that then vanished (I tried
to refund the latter, but e-mails to them no longer work.) I've received a
very large number of donations over the years. Should be around $5000 in
license sales, $7500 in donations, and another $2500 to fundraise hiring a
person to decap chips and extract program code from them for improving
emulation. I've also had multiple people make very specialized custom hardware
that has helped me out more than words can express. I've had people trust me
and lend me thousands of dollars worth of rare games for the purpose of
verifying information for emulation and then returning them.

But I would be lying if I said it was all good. At the time of writing, I am
aware of _eighteen_ forks of my emulator. Two of these projects in particular
never talk to me or submit upstream fixes, and instead commit changes to their
own repository with extremely derogatory remarks about me and my programming
skills. Two of these intentionally undermine and sabotage the entire goal of
what I've been working on from day one (namely, adding known-incorrect hacks
to speed up emulation. My distaste for hacks was the whole reason I got
involved with emulation in the first place.)

Most of the forks of my software are from versions I released either three and
a half years ago, or six years ago. A small number of them are quite popular,
meaning my work may as well have been discontinued for those users.

One fork collects over $2,000 a month on Patreon off the backs of others'
emulator cores including mine -- even ones that are explicitly non-commercial.
One developer just wantonly ignored my GPL license and sells my emulator on
Steam, doesn't provide any attribution or credit for using my work, and plays
games when people try and get the source code to said work (but to be fair,
one person did obtain it.) That one was made particularly worse because he
wasted a good 20+ hours of my time over the span of six months promising
repeatedly to license my emulator, only to back away at the last minute and
pull this without even telling me.

I've had people very blatantly read through my source code to improve their
emulators and documentation, and not just avoid giving me credit, but outright
deny having ever looked at my code. In the most egregious case, someone copied
a set of opcode mnemonics from a CPU core. Only ... that CPU core was never
publicly documented: I made up every single mnemonic myself, and the only
place those mnemonics existed were in my source code.

I've ended up with two people who have harassed and impersonated me online for
six and eleven years respectively now, for reasons I really can't comprehend.
I've had half the main staff of the most popular emulator out there make a
passtime of digging through my 400K-line codebase, looking for individual
lines that were poorly written to mock completely out of context in a public
chat area -- and they're people I still have to work with often.

But what I always remind myself is, it's easier to dwell on the negatives.
It's possible I could have made a lot more money with commercial licensing
sales if my work were closed source. But my software is vastly better than it
would be without all the help I've received over the years due to being open
source. And I benefited a lot from other open source emulators, so it would be
pretty selfish to not return the favor to others. There's no sense in me
trying to force people to use my version of my software. I'd rather have a
smaller number of users who actually fully appreciate what I'm going for. And
I have a pretty thick skin at this point for the rest of it.

That said, do put as much thought as you can into this before releasing as
open source. Once you do so, you can _never_ go back. Even if you try, your
work will be forked at the last open source release. But speaking for myself,
if I could go back and do it all again, I would still keep everything open
source.

~~~
raybb
If you don't mind me asking, are you still working full time along with
developing the emulators? Have you ever run into any legal trouble with making
them?

~~~
byuu
I am still working on them all, yes.

No legal trouble so far. I don't use any information that isn't publicly
available (although let's be honest, no one can truly say that all public
documentation was created clean room; and emudevs can't know without having
seen the original or being informed of this), and I also don't include any
copyrighted code. Only very small boot IPLROMs that qualify for fair use
(ineligibility for copyright) under Lexmark v SCC.

The real kicker is the Game Boy Advance. It requires a 16KiB BIOS to boot. Any
attempts at a high level emulation or a recreation of the ARM assembly code
will result in inaccurate emulation, which is a bridge I won't cross. Games
can literally read the whole BIOS out (unofficially, but it's possible.) Thus,
games can even go as far as to compare every byte of the BIOS. Without the
BIOS, the detection of an emulator is an absolutely trivial matter.

I suspect it would be safe to include it, but will not risk it after Sony v
Connectix -- easily the worst court precedent in the history of emulation. A
judge who had absolutely no understanding of technical matters with regards to
emulation and how his ruling created a perfect end-run against the possibility
of ever producing a perfect, legal, free emulator.

I'm also hamstrung on the coprocessor firmware included within many game
cartridges. Titles using such things won't boot in higan like they will in
emulators that use HLE, thus making my emulator more difficult to use than
everyone else's.

------
stutsmansoft
I made a Delphi component once. It was immediately modified in ways I
disagreed with, renamed, and spread by someone else.

The person who did this didn’t even have a conversation with me about it
before doing so.

This was before GitHub and forking and such, but it made me feel angry and
unappreciated.

The code that went around was almost entirely my work.

I’m still bitter 25 years later and I’ve never contributed to Open Sores
again.

~~~
43224gg252
It always seems to be the older generation that has this crappy immature
attitude. I'm glad I have to work with less and less people like you.

~~~
sumedh
> crappy immature attitude.

Wow the guy the released his code for free which was used by others without
giving him any credits and he is the one with crappy immature attitude.

------
devdad
As a business owner, it's much easier for me to have an invoice (for the
books) than explaining why I sent money through PayPal. Nothing is impossible,
but it's more of a hassle for me to donate.

We recently started to go through our commercial projects in a structured way
and setup a small budget for OSS donations / support. Please setup some easy
way to just give a receipt for support or anything else I can document.
Purchase via CC is okay but I need receipts. :)

Thanks to all creators in here that let's me keep a much higher development
pace.

------
tyingq
One use case that's often regrettable is software targeted at non-tech people.
I made a free plug in for a shopping cart platform. Lots of happy users, but
the occasional person ranting about how it doesn't work for them, and is
expecting free troubleshooting and bug fixes on their schedule. A couple
spinning into insults and swearing when the answer is "sorry, but I'm unable
to help, maybe try a similar plugin from someone else".

~~~
20years
I had a similar experience when I released an open source real estate search
plugin for Wordpress years ago. It gained traction and was covered by a few
very prominent real estate blogs/news sites which resulted in over 10,000
downloads in 2 weeks.

There were some people who were not able to get it to work with their theme,
shared hosting environment, other plugin conflicts, etc. and expected me to
install/troubleshoot. I was spending almost my entire day trying to help
people and I couldn't handle the demand especially with that many downloads in
such a short period of time.

So I decided to put up paid support versions ranging from $50 to $150. People
flipped out when I did that and literally attacked me in comment threads. I
tried explaining the time commitment this entailed and that it was taking me
away from my core business but the mob didn't care. They were mad that I
wasn't willing to install or troubleshoot their environment for free.

I ended up taking the plugin down and since then (it's been 7 years) I haven't
open sourced anything major and will probably never release a Wordpress plugin
to the public again.

In hindsight, I probably could have made decent money from that plugin if I
charged for it initially. It probably would not have gained as much traction
or popularity but I think the outcome would have been very different.

------
Johnny_Brahms
I have regretted my choice of licences, so now I only go copyleft. That has
allowed me to monetize some small libraries with a pretty specific use case.
Some companies wont use code they haven't got an invoice for.

------
leeoniya
i originally open-sourced some interesting algorithms built atop a lib i also
open-sourced and realized later when building SaaS that it was unwise to have
them open, so i force-pushed a commit that removed them from the repo after
seeing that all public forks were out of date and did not have them yet.

it helped that the lib never got popular so it was easy to do. there could
still be some fork/clone somewhere that has them though :)

------
nvivo
I regret publishing some ideas I had as an open source project. Once it got
other people's attention I had so much work trying to document, answer issues
and maintain the project that in the end I got tired of it all and had to
stop. I really loved the project, but open source is a lot of work, and most
of it is not development, but choosing who to give attention, trust, etc, you
must be prepared for that. If I kept it for myself I would probably still be
working on it and would be using it in my work related projects.

------
richardknop
I haven't regretted making anything open source.

I do agree with the sentiment expressed here several times. Once my open
source project gets popular it seems that there is a flood of incoming bug fix
/ feature requests and it is quite overwhelming.

People expect you to just work on the open source library almost as it were
your full time job (without a compensation). So that can be frustrating.

This problem can be solved by finding skilled contributors who would be
willing to work with you on maintaining the project but this can be quite
difficult.

Let's say your project is just reasonably popular (1-2 thousand stars on
Github), you will be hard pressed to find willing contributors. It's much
easier once the project gets very popular (5k stars I guess).

It also depends on the language and niche of the library. Might be easier to
find contributors in certain languages than others.

Having said all that, my open source projects have actually paid me back in a
way of interesting work opportunities that I wouldn't otherwise stumble upon.
And it's a nice to have some reasonably well received open source project on
your CV.

Finally, I would like to shamelessly plug my project:
[https://github.com/RichardKnop/machinery](https://github.com/RichardKnop/machinery)

Core contributors / maintainers always welcome!

------
geekodour
I made a static blog generator based on github
([https://github.com/geekodour/gitpushblog](https://github.com/geekodour/gitpushblog))
I thought people will like it, It seems I wasted about 1month making that in
my free time. I even wrote a funny blogpost about it in a blog generated by
that generator ( [https://geekodour.github.io/posts/dont-waste-your-time-
makin...](https://geekodour.github.io/posts/dont-waste-your-time-making-your-
own-open-source-project) )

~~~
fiatjaf
Are you sad because your open-source project didn't get traction?

That happens all the time with most people, I guess. Someday it may attract
some people, but it is not a "fair" game. Chance matters a lot.

I have at least 10 libraries on GitHub that I think should have gained some
visibility, but didn't. There are thousands of similar cases.

I suggest that you keep the idea machine on and keep building stuff.

~~~
zzzcpan
Visibility is the easiest part, when you need it - just advertise and do PR,
no reason to rely on a pure chance. Open source projects are often accepted by
a lot of places, that do not allow ads for commercial products and services.
But then you are going to have the same problem as others pointed out - doing
free work. So unless you find a way to make your work on this project
sustainable there is little point in gaining visibility.

~~~
fiatjaf
You can only say that after you've had visibility.

------
pryelluw
A small group of maintainers and me (also oss maintainer) are working on
solving oss funding issues. This is not a startup or a pitch. If youd like to
join the conversation drop me a line at pryelluw[at]gmail

------
princekolt
I don't know if it counts, but I have decided on not publishing a project I
worked on (sporadically) for 14 months either as a binary or as open-source
code because of previous experience with a fairly popular open-source software
I published a few years ago.

People expect you to work full-time on your project and get angry when you
don't fix bugs. I have enough stress at work, where I'm paid to do things.

That hasn't stopped me from making things open-source though, I still enjoy
it, and it has caused me to contribute more to other projects.

------
chafporte
Copycats ! I've released a small library to display cross-platform dialogs
(because I couldn't find what I needed) and 2 weeks later a copy cat released
a similar Library/API but based on a different approach. In the next years, at
least 2 other competing projects joined the party. Mine is tiny file dialogs.

------
suretec
Not yet. Things we sponsor we always open source. They've always gone further
than we ever hoped.

------
88e282102ae2e5b
I'm glad I did it, but it was definitely more work than I was expecting.

------
mmirate
Obviously, anyone who made anything popular and permissively-licensed has
undergone such regret when corporations scooped it up and used it gratis
without contributing anything back.

Lesson: if you use a permissive license, you are acknowledging that your work
is worth nothing to you. Because that's what you'll get for it; whereas it may
easily be worthwhile to sell a proprietary-licensed binary of your copylefted
work.

------
mherrmann
Not me and not OS but Pieter Levels said he regretted offering an API for
Nomad List [1].

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/861259743603470336](https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/861259743603470336)

~~~
knocte
That's not opensourcing something, but giving a service for free.

------
arca_vorago
I think the difference between Foss and "open source" should be noted in
questions like this.

Open source != foss

------
shmerl
Any particular reason you'd expect someone to regret it?

------
fdik
Never.

------
LeicaLatte
Yes

