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:
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.
Not that I regret it, but I found out that creating a community around an open source project is not like what you expect. I've been working on a tool for a very popular project for more than two years, adding features, refining it etc. since I had my time. Reading many comments on HN and Reddit on how people don't like current dominant tool or its alternatives, what features they expect etc. I thought I've got one that people would like to use.
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 made the mistake of open-sourcing something that attracted a large mob angry that an outsider had intruded upon their space. Got doxed, death threats, and my employer was also harassed. Even after I publicly abandoned and repudiated the project I still get crap about it.
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.
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.
My worst experience is to submit two decent PR that was ignored by maintainers. I had burden to support them for a month, solving merge conflicts, solving new bugs in the main branch that were merged without testing, and to adapt test system to prove my changes are solving something.
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...
Not quite an open-source project, but I did a massive blog post series on Microservices in Golang. It sort of became a bit of a defacto starting point for a while, it was an immense amount of work and effort. But I found my inbox flooded with people asking for advice, and honestly, writing about it all made me realise how ridiculous Microservices often are. I could tell many of the people asking me didn't really need them, and I found myself trying to advise them away from it. So I ended up with loads of work, but with caveats all over the place trying to convince people they didn't need any of it.
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
When I was a younger man, I fought long and hard and spent many late nights on the phone with the lawyers abroad, to convince my company to open source a tool that I was proud of and thought would help our brand and attract new developers. They finally granted approval, but I was not allowed to accept features or updates, customer service, spend time on fixes, accept pull requests, etc. Unfortunately my name was all over it, and I came to hate the fact that I had championed this, forced to watch the code rot and interest wane because the company couldn't fathom anything OSS besides lobbing some dead code over the wall periodically.
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.
Not personally, but twice in my career I’ve been part of interview loops with people who had created semi-famous open source projects. Projects that you’ve heard of if you read a lot of HN, but not so critical that you couldn’t think of another alternative if it disappeared.
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 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 don't have any super popular repos but I do have a few with 500 to 1500 stars and while not necassarily regret, I don't think I've ever gotten a single pull request that I could just acccept as is.
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.
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.
Yes - I open sourced a web game which was promptly ripped off and plastered with banner ads. The copycat impersonated me on social media claiming to be the developer. I promptly made the repo private and made many improvements after that point in time so the damage wasn't too bad. But the copycat got a better Google ranking which focused people. There are also a lot of link-farm sites where web games are proxied and embedded with links to other games. The embedding problems went away once I used Cloudflare. This confused a lot of fans as they'd find the awful ad-ridden copycat site. So my advice to anyone with a side project which isn't a library is to keep it private and behind a CDN.
I regret everything I ever open sourced
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
No regrets here, but I did use Google Code a fair bit prior to GitHub and I had an experience that made me think maybe Google regretted that product in some ways.
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 wrote a toy Kotlin compiler, for fun. Then one day a Jetbrains employee opens an issue which only says: “Why? Just why?”. Maybe it’s the language barrier… but I did not find that particularly polite.
On the other hand I open sourced my blog and received lots of small contributions to fix typos or such which were nice.
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.
In 1981 I wrote a tool that is still in use today. You can install the package on most major linux distros. This was before we paid much attention to software copyright, and I simply published it with my name on it and no license.
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.
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.
Obviously not me, but I remember John Carmack regretting releasing Doom and Quake under GPL instead of BSD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#:~:text=The%20sou...
I don't understand why more projects haven't adopted the "open-source, closed-contribution" model of SQLite. Seems much more sustainable than the default model where a maintainer is expected to review every patch and respond to every issue.
Got death threats because I wasn't prioritizing stuff people were requesting, said nah I'm done
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.
>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 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
My current position is a source available license for any product I am working on solo. You can definitely get at the source code, but I'm gonna make you pay me money first and sign an NDA.
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.
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...
Never invest into FOSS time, money, or energy and expect anything positive or monetary in return. Having unreasonable expectations is a self-imposed trap and sure to lead to resentment and/or burn-out.
There's no point in regretting a situation where you believed in the good faith of other people.
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.
Just add to the license "if you are a megacorp you owe us $1000+ per year". I don't understand why it's so hard.
We went full in and not only open sourced the firmware of our air quality monitors but made it completely open source hardware, this means it includes the electronic schematics, enclosure files etc. [1]
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?
I have regretted releasing OSS under the umbrella of employers, and will likely not do so in the future. And while I never regretted releasing OSS as such, I did often have regrets that while I know the software was better than what was currently available in the market, me being bad at marketing meant that it would still not get any use.
The opposite. I regret not pushing harder to be allowed to release more things as open source. Built lots of useful tools at a previous job that would have benefited "the community", and while management initially seemed happy to open source them, the request was never granted.
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.
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.
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 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 was about 13 and contributed to an Apple open source mailing list -- I forget which one. I included the entire email chain and got a very very stern telling off from the list maintainers for doing so and my code sunk without a trace.
I didn't try to release code again until the end of my PhD.
I wrote MetalLB, a bare metal load-balancer for Kubernetes, because I needed one for myself. It gained some popularity because for a couple years, it was the only way to get working L4 LB outside of clouds. These days I believe a couple of the CNIs added support for external BGP peering and integration with k8s's LB machinery, but that came years later.
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.
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'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`.
Hell yes. Had a particularly insane minor contributor take the project and put it up on the store without asking. After I had it taken down they did things like harass my family and threaten me. They caught federal charges for interstate threats and found themselves 'retiring from tech' not long after.
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 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.
Can't say I regret it, but did not enjoy when a small enhancement PR I wanted to push to an academic visualization toolkit took more of my time to wrangle the licensing than to write the patches.
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.
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.
I think with anything, it's a love hate. I open sourced https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover, and it's been cool in terms of vanity, but depending on my mood it either feels cool or like a chore to do work on it.
I haven't had the chance to write anything open source, but now with AI everywhere I don't think I will
i was asked for a third party lib exemption licence, i asked for a sweetener...no, they couldn't even answer me after that
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 :)
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.
Never.
Never.
Nope. I should have gone open source much sooner.
This sounds bad but the only reason I open source my projects is because to publish on NPM as a free account I need my packages to be public, and therefore my packages need to not be horrible and have no documentation.
Otherwise I'd just keep my packages private.
I don't open source anything, because we live in a world where people who get jobs and rewards are not the same people who put in the work. I don't wish to feed that system. Other comments here are great examples of why no one should.
No because my standards are nonexistent
I don't regret open sourcing my libraries. One of them got some traction and provided me with opportunities which eventually led me to earn passive income for 3 years and I was able to live in Malta, going snorkeling in the Mediterranean every other day while working casually on whatever side projects I wanted.
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.
In general, being a point of contact for a small community project means you sometimes get weirdos showing up to your door IRL, or various other scams and abuse.
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
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No
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.
To be honest, I do regret it. After 20 years of working on FOSS projects, I've invested enormous amounts of time, effort, and money into these and other free/open-source initiatives. It was enjoyable initially - there's something addictive about receiving praise from strangers and unknown communities. You keep going because it feels good and you develop a sense of moral superiority. But years later, when the people closest to you are no longer around - you pause and reflect on how much energy you devoted to random strangers instead of those who shared your life. If I had invested even 1% of the time and effort I put into FOSS projects into my relationships with loved ones, they would have been so much happier. Now I'm left wondering what the hell I was doing all those years https://giis.co.in/foss.html