Open source is a source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. It has gained huge popularity in recent years and I believe we are making better projects together 💖
It might seem like an odd question, tho, have you ever regretted giving access to some code for the public? If so, what was the case?
Top comments (17)
Not necessarily, open-source is amazing! I do regret committing my
.envfile once though.If you are not starting your project from the ground-up, all the frameworks usually come with .gitignore with .env already on the list, just to be sure 😀😀
Forget that, I committed a file which had tokens inside of it, didn't know about dotenv back then. 😐
And pushed the file...
god I love synchronicity; I did this yesterday and the learned about Ruby .dotenv...magical
Most of the time i made good experience with open-source and it's community all around the world.
I had this one project i was working on and released it to GitHub because i thought some people will find it useful. It good bigger and i was threatened by a user because of not immediately fixing a bug because his team used it in production.
I'm still using a lot of open-source and love the community but this event made it hard for me to ever release something again.
It's very important to have your mods ready! :D
Hey there and welcome to DEV! :)
I feel you, I had a similar experience. I built a backup mechanism for a big enterprise tool, that was free on github to use for private people. But corporations had to license it.
So I went and build that backup mechanism and my customer demanded I contribute to the original software. It was an "interesting" experience to say the least. The company demanded all kinds of, IMHO, unnecessary beauty changes, since their users "don't like command switches" (for a command line tool...).
So I went along with it, always having my customer breath down my neck "is it done yet?".
That took a lot of fun out of it, since then I kept my motivation mostly to my own projects.
As for your situation, I can only recommend this DEV post.
It's fantastic and may help you with moments like yours :)
I myself: no.
But I recently had a discussion with the maintainer of an open source project who asked me to sign a contributor license form if I wanted to continue to contribute code. He felt he would regret it later if he wanted to change the license, for instance.
Also, it turned out that he was not too happy with pull-requests in general. In his opinion, the costs (time for dealing with people not pre-qualifying/discussing features beforehand, people ignoring coding standards, bad code, etc.) outweigh the benefits that he gains from contributions. Well, but once you opened the project and it got some traction as being open (in contrast to similar software around), it's hard to shut the doors again, I guess.
That's exactly what I thought when I created this discussion 😉
You have to be forward-thinking in the beginning, as you have to remember that you can always open the closed ones, but it's not always easy to close the open ones once people have started to go through and there is a queue outside 😉
🤔 😅
hahah, made my day 😂😂
Never, I'm using open sources all the time, and it makes your job much easier. so it just makes sense to give back to the community, and also it's a lot of fun!
and if we are already talking about open-sources. I've been started a new open-source project in the last few days. its a q&a and knowledge management application (like Stack Overflow, Quora etc... but open-source, the idea is to give organizations the ability to setup them self and for their employees a platform to share and save knowledge inside the organization)
I'm looking for contributors (senior and junior developers, you're all welcome of course)
this is the GitHub link: github.com/veaos/veaos
if you need help starting contributing and need a mentor you can reach me at GitHub or here (you can find contact details in my profile)
I once published my project that many different communities where using as a tracker.
After a while, someone found a vulnerability in the src code and all these communities were suddenly at cut throat position.
Was a fast thing to fix, but took time until I even got told about it.
Overall no, but we had to switch once to another localization library and twice to another validation library because the ones we used were abandoned and we didn't have time to continue the libraries ourselves. We make products with a lifetime of 10 to 20 years, so the chance of a library to become deprecated at some point is rather high.
Open Source is beautiful. Just to be clear, I am not saying some Cult thing here. I'd like Open Source because it actually enhanced my coding skills, at the same time make a project solid and sexy.
Not yet, but probably I would be, if I am better at marketing.
Actually, I am looking for a mentor on this.
I hate writing awesome stuff only to learn that someone has done it. But I love that someone has done so I can save some time and focus on my project.