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

Licensing, monetization, and “giving away the farm”

• Many regret using very permissive licenses (esp. MIT) for full applications: others rebranded, monetized, or claimed authorship, with only thin or no attribution, and little realistic recourse.
• Some wish they’d used GPL/AGPL or dual-licensing (copyleft + commercial) to force negotiation or protect from pure free-riding; others argue copyleft scares companies away entirely.
• Several people open-sourced things they later realized could have been viable products; they now favor source-available or “freemium source” models, open-core, or paid support/prioritization.
• There’s tension between ideals (free software for users) and pragmatism (creators needing rent and long‑term incentives).

Maintenance burden, entitlement, and burnout

• A major source of regret is the support load: feature demands, low‑quality PRs, vague bug reports, and users treating maintainers as unpaid staff.
• Popular projects attracted hostile or entitled users, including harassment and even death threats over prioritization decisions.
• Some maintainers now disable issues, reject outside contributions, or explicitly say “no support; fork it yourself” to protect their time and sanity.

Copying, scams, and vendor reactions

• Multiple stories of code or apps being cloned, lightly renamed, plastered with ads, resold, or repeatedly re‑uploaded to app stores.
• Reverse-engineering or patching proprietary systems (e.g., sync services, always‑online games) sometimes led vendors to lock down or treat user configurability as a “vulnerability,” burning the contributor and discouraging future disclosure.

Employer IP, NDAs, and side projects

• Several commenters regretted trying to get corporate approval to open‑source side projects: review committees stalled or denied them, or claimed ownership.
• Some now quietly release under prior-invention lists or pseudonyms; others avoid side projects while at large companies.
• Legal protections (e.g., in specific jurisdictions) help somewhat, but big employers can still argue that “everything relates to our business.”

AI, open source, and the value of code

• Concerns that open code is being used to train LLMs without credit or compensation, further devaluing human expertise.
• Debate over whether AI can meaningfully maintain projects, enforce scope, and protect against malicious contributions; many doubt current models’ ability to catch subtle bugs or backdoors.
• Some expect AI to make forks and one‑off modifications explode, increasing noise and weird bug reports against unofficial variants.

Community culture, toxicity, and personal cost

• Several painful anecdotes of abusive feedback on mailing lists and issue trackers (including “kill yourself” messages to teenagers), which delayed or stopped people’s participation for years.
• Others note the broader problem: codes of conduct help only if backed by fair governance; otherwise power struggles and overreach can create new frictions.
• A few reflect that decades spent contributing FOSS for external validation came at the expense of relationships and personal life.

Positive experiences and mitigations

• Some contributors report no regrets: small projects, low visibility, or clear boundaries kept things pleasant.
• Others credit open source with career opportunities, paid sabbaticals, or niche businesses (e.g., open hardware), even if they’d tune licenses differently next time.
• Suggested strategies: clear “for me first” positioning, paid feature/priority models, open-source-but-closed-contribution like SQLite, strong documentation of scope, and emotionally preparing to say “no” often.