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0 pointsmartin-t1mo ago0 comments

If you had the option to also delete all your contributions to the side, would you have done it?

If you had the option to exclude only certain people (e.g. those who argues with you) from seeing/using your contributions, would you have done it instead of deleting your account?

I am asking because I've too been burned and it's very commonly how an open source contributor's journey ends. So I've been toying with the idea that contributors should be able to exclude certain people or perhaps even groups of people from using their work.

Basically "I give away my work for free for anyone to use and build upon but if you don't appreciate it, if you treat me like shit, if you do any of X Y Z which hurts me or other people, then you're no longer allowed to use it".

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em-bee1mo ago

i understand the sentiment, but the nature of FOSS is that i can't really prevent anyone from using it. i'd have to police it, and that would just lead to more misery.

i too contributed to stackoverflow and eventually stopped because it didn't feel worth the effort. i never asked a question though, so i didn't have the experience GP made, but i doubt i would want to delete everything, at least not without moving all my answers to another location.

once or twice when searching for the solution to a specific problem i was lead to a stackoverflow question and had to discover that the answer that solved my problem was my own from a decade earlier. so i too benefit from posting answers. deleting them would reduce that benefit.

martin-tOP1mo ago

> the nature of FOSS is that i can't really prevent anyone from using it

That's my point - maybe FOSS isn't the absolute good we've been lead to believe.

It was a response to locked down proprietary software which increasingly became hostile to its users. And it is (from a user's perspective) better that that for sure. But from a dev perspective, it's not as good as it could be.

> my answers

Exactly, those are your answers, your work. We've spent a lot of our limited time working for other people's benefit because we believed in it or sometimes because it was fun. But ultimately, it's becoming clear other people don't care and will throw us under the bus as soon as we're no longer useful. And then there's people who are just looking for a way to take advantage of us.

And I want to exclude both from benefiting from my work.

We should strive to find methods to make good, productive, pro-social people to benefit while keeping anyone who wants to exploit us away.

streetfighter641mo ago

Getting free stuff is good for the user of the stuff, yes. Giving away stuff for free might not feel good if you don't like the people you're giving the stuff away to, yes.

People aren't "taking advantage" of you by benefiting from the free work that you voluntarily do. They may be rude towards you, but it's your choice to work for them or not.

If you release your work to the world, there's no license agreement in existence that will prevent "undesirables" from benefiting from your work. See: all of the AIs being trained on publicly accessible code (regardless of its license).

The answer is just, do write open source code if you think it's fun, and you're okay with the worst people you can imagine using your code. If you write a geodata library, it might be used in a targeting module for a bomb, which might in turn be launched towards civilians. That's just a consequence you'll have to accept.

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