I think an important factor is also how long you had the same number. I switch numbers every couple of years because I get a new contract and moving the number to the new company is such a hassle. Over time you share your number with more and more companies and people who sell it or get breached.
My parents had their number for ~30 years. I never get spam calls or texts. They get one once a week or so (this is in Germany, we get a lot fewer of these calls).
In theory you cannot even say for all programs and all inputs if the program will finish the calculation [0]. In practice you often can break it down but the number of combinations of input is what makes it impossible to test everything. Most developers try to keep individual functions as small as possible to understand them easier. You can use math to do formal verification, but that gets difficult with real programs too.
I wasn't aware of that; it wasn't clearly specified. It only mentioned a "secret" feature, but I assumed it was AI-related rather than UI-related. Additionally, Anthropic's Claude Code position on their website states that they expect their developers to work across the stack, including both front-end and back-end.
Right now it is just a hobby and there are still a number of bugs remaining. Since I don't have an income from it, I can't dedicate more time to it. Hiring me would allow me to work on fixing them full time and make the progress much faster
Hey, props to your attitude, and I wish you the best of luck.
Obviously, you've provided value to a company in a really in-demand area. It doesn't feel right to treat the contributors like this. Sadly, it seems that the companies have the power and the intent to just abuse and exploit
I don't have a solution. I am just expressing my frustration from the perceived injustice.
Correct, you cannot remove a version or the whole crate unless very specific criteria are fulfilled. You can "yank" versions. That prevents people from adding the version as a new dependency, but if you relied on it before it got yanked, your build will succeed.
I wouldn't delete old versions even if I could though. My goal is to publish a rock solid library that everyone can depend on and build awesome projects with
Hey, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for submitting this. If you have any questions feel free to ask and please let me know how the writing was. It's one of my first posts so I'd like to improve
You should change the license to AGPL and 'custom, contact for payment details', and provide a link to this as why you did so.
Simply put, anything not a viral license like GPL allows parasitization by companies effectively living off FLOSS devs, with absolutely nothing to gain. Human rights under GPL were meant to apply to humans, not '3 lawyers in a trench coat' (corporations).
They can make their decisions (snubbing a dev of code they deem good enough for enterprise). And you can make comparable decisions, punishing them for the sheer hubris.
It also reaffirms that my decision of AGPL for everything is the right one. They can contact for custom terms.
> It also reaffirms that my decision of AGPL for everything is the right one. They can contact for custom terms.
Since your replies below are focusing on compensation: have you actually made a nontrivial amount of money with that model?
I would expect that should be a prerequisite to reaffirm it was the correct decision, especially if you're giving unsolicited advice to strangers about how they should license their software.
Some people want others to freely use their software and choose MIT precisely because it's more free than GPL. There's nothing wrong with just making something for free and giving it away if that's what you want. Not everybody has to be chasing money in all their activities.
The author said he was proud of this outcome and nervous at how widely his hobby project will be deployed. That sounds like the ambition of many open source authors and a win. Might never have happened with GPL.
> Some people want others to freely use their software and choose MIT precisely because it's more free than GPL.
MIT license is absolutely not 'more free' than the GPL.
In fact, MIT means you give up effective ownership and control. You lose control and contributions.
And what do you get for that loss of control? Exposure. Or, in this and many other cases similar, you get diddly shit. Some company paracitizes your code, sometimes even demands SOC questionnaires and 'do this bug NOW', and other abuse.
> Not everybody has to be chasing money in all their activities.
Talk about missing the point! This was all about money. It was about a job at the company where the code is being used in a production manner. And they didn't even bother to give an interview.
And not many of us are independently wealthy, and can do things that we want with no monetary care. And, most FLOSS devs aren't that. Instead, they're being used as unpaid stepping stones so some overvalued AI hypesquad can vibecode (or slotmachine programming) faster.
> The author said he was proud of this outcome and nervous at how widely his hobby project will be deployed. That sounds like the ambition of many open source authors and a win. Might never have happened with GPL.
That's where I hope the author relicenses as LGPL and proprietary, and doesn't give Anthropic any more free professional work.
And if it never would have happened with the GPL, gasp, they would have had to pay developers to create it.
And until I'm independently wealthy, I too will license AGPL. If you're making money on my stuff, I want a cut. Simple as that.
>MIT means you give up effective ownership and control. You lose control and contributions. And what do you get for that loss of control? Exposure. Or, in this and many other cases similar, you get diddly shit.
Isn't that what true freedom is?
You can argue that more freedom is a net burden for both the individual and society (tragedy of the commons), but that doesn't negate the aspect of it being more free to begin with.
>And not many of us are independently wealthy, and can do things that we want with no monetary care.
Indeed. But not many people contribute to any kind of OS community to begin with (regardless of the license). I would like to one day, but then the industry laid me and hundreds of thousands off in the last few years and those plans were delayed.
There definitely is a certain level of privilege in being able to provide knowledge to others on the side. Even morose if you're part of an organization that pays you to do so.
Maximum freedom is when people have the freedom to do everything except take away other people's freedom. When you give people the freedom to take away other people's freedom, you don't get a free society.
So, what is your net-worth, in that you fight for freebies to corporations? What net worth should I strive towards so I can be nonchalant and passe about money?
I'm certainly not there.
Also more curious, is the AGPL doesn't affect humans doing stuff. It affects companies when they grab, modify, and host and not share contributions. Read about anti-TIVOization. That's why the AGPL. I'm guessing you know this, and why you're attacking my viewpoints as 'missing the point'.
And yes, copyright is everywhere. And the GPL has some of the sanest terms to reuse, as long as you follow the requirement. And the GPL also further grows the ecosystem, due to virality.
But Anthropic wasn't exactly submitting code either, were they? In my world, parasites get antiparasitic drugs.
> So, what is your net-worth, in that you fight for freebies to corporations? What net worth should I strive towards so I can be nonchalant and passe about money?
I've seen people with un-stressed about money with net-worths that are orders of magnitudes below those that seem to obsess about it.
Your motivations are your motivations, if you don't like the idea of someone using your work to make money without giving you a cut, you can do you, but why is it hard to understand that other people might just not care that much about it (or, gasp, even find their work being used more rewarding than the potential monetary compensation)
> Also more curious, is the AGPL doesn't affect humans doing stuff.
It does affect humans doing stuff that isn't malicious, like if you need to solve a problem by modifying the code then now you also have to make that change public which is a hassle, I'd rather not have to track or maintain such things. I'd rather not have to think about that, and I care more about such nuisances than I care about the possibility of companies stealing it.
The scenario you are describing (discovering a problem to fix, being able to fix it, but then not sharing the fix with other people) is the exact reason why GPL has been invented: to force people to share their work, so that we can all have better software, together. Maybe the software you are using wouldn't have been that good if other people weren't forced to share their improvements. Your small effort is going to help others, and their small efforts are going to help you even more. This mindset of sharing should be natural but, as you just proved, people are lazy and so the license has to force them.
> If you're making money on my stuff, I want a cut. Simple as that.
It's clear that you're motivated by personal compensation for your work, which is fine, but it means you shouldn't license it as MIT. Other people are motivated by knowing that their work is useful to others, and those people shouldn't use GPL because it hinders that aim.
I know a bunch of people have tried to argue the toss on this one with you but I'd just like to put it out there that I can't agree strongly enough! Anyone watching can see these big companies are happy to toss developers to the side and develop social harms for profit.
All of this is built on exploiting the open source movement. Delineating between closed source ventures and Free community efforts is just good sense at this point. If they're going to take they must give back.
Cool. Thanks for the link, but I wasn't actually trying to steal anyone's thunder, and ... I did read the article. Just felt that it wouldn't hurt to link to it.
Also, that discussion gets pretty mean. Didn't feel like I wanted to send people there. I just wanted to give the guy a pat on the back, and bring some humor into it. Been there. Sucks.
I don't know--As a non-celebrity tech worker, it's actually kind of comforting to see a company that doesn't just automatically roll out the red carpet and grease internal wheels, just because a candidate once wrote some very popular software. It sounds like there are still companies that make you go through the same whiteboard hazing and non-deterministic hiring process as the rest of us mere mortals, regardless of how well known you are.
Actually, I don't disagree with some of the people that had issues with him, but I do have issues with folks that refuse to look at past performance, in general (I'm biased. I have a great deal of past performance, and can prove it).
It was just a kind of nasty conversation, and I didn't feel that it was appropriate to deliberately send folks there. I'm not really into the whole "Make the Internet Darker for Everyone" schtick.
Hey, great work, and just wanted to lend my voice in support! It's kind of wild how many open source devs have a story along similar lines. (Mine is the time when Mojang used my voxel engine..)
Now that this is trending on Hacker News, surely there will be a happy ending when someone from Anthropic sees this post and hires you with sincerest apologies and everyone lives happily ever after? Can we get a positive story out of this, universe?
What's the risk? The current state is "your application has been thrown into a fire and will never be seen by human eyes". How can it get worse than that? There is no downside to complaining on HN, except for getting the reputation that you really wanted to work there, which, again, isn't that negative of a thing.
I don't know. I have no comparison but it is common for crates to be released under MIT. I took over the maintainership from the original author so the license was already there. I rewrote pretty much everything so I guess I could try changing the license now but that's not something I wanna think about.
I do the work because I see it as payback for all the great open source software I use all the time.
I really like the copyleft idea, however, I think you did nothing wrong, IMHO, because if large corps like an idea, they will rather reimplement it rather than even bothering with ways to conform to AGPL or buy an alternative licence.
Particular in the age of AI, all source available code has become pretty much public domain (value is still in maintenance, etc). License have mostly become a compliance/ideology game that alienates most people. However, changing the license on the main repo, with only a minor version bump, would be a nice asshole move to get their attention past HR (won't make a difference, but if you have nothing to lose).
Copyright is but one pillar of intellectual property law.
I’d like to see an attempt by useful freedom respecting software projects to deploy patents to combat non-free reimplementations.
A GPL license that grants you rights to the backing patent as long as the software you develop with it is also released under the GPL license.
Use the library for closed source software? Copyright violation. Reimplement the software under another license? Patent violation. Create something slightly different and call it the same thing? Trademark violation.
Not sure of the rest of the world, but at least in the US, patenting “software” is a pretty murky subject legally (at least it feels that way when trying to do some basic research on it) Something that seems common among sources discussing it is that “Software Related Inventions” (eg, a computer that does XYZ) can be patentable, but software/code itself is not literally patentable. Seemingly, because we’re talking about libraries that would be pure software, not a product for sale based on it, you wouldn’t be able patent libraries like you’re talking about.
I’d provide links to some discourse of this, but honestly I think it’s better to search “can you patent software in the US” and do a brief read of various sources, because the terminology between them can seem somewhat counterfactual to eachother.
Copyright mostly protects big corps nowadays. That's because you need lawyers to enforce copyright, and if the other side has more money the battle may not be worth it.
On the other hand, Meta was found torrenting terabytes of books and for them it's a nothingburger. The rules are really meant for commoners.
Nah, forget this attitude of yours. You created something that a behemoth like Anthropic uses and literally noone thought about compensating you. Kick the ladder out of them, and go hard on their balls.
> but it is common for crates to be released under MIT
Something that isn't brought up enough in the "rewrite everything in Rust" discussions is that the API guidelines explicitly recommend MIT/Apache to "maximize compatibility" (i.e., corporate friendliness, or developer and user exploitation): https://rust-lang.github.io/api-guidelines/necessities.html#...
Your project has been around for a while, but it's crazy to me that anyone still open sources anything under MIT (or similar) in the era of LLMs. Are they that confident in their job security? Are they already independently wealthy? Frankly, even a proper copyleft license is likely to just be ignored, or the code laundered through an LLM-assisted rewrite, by these companies. I prefer to just keep anything I can't sell all to myself rather than release it, at this point.
Hey mate, I would just like to say that I wish they at least find it in their hearts to reward you for the value you have provided to them. Knowing cut throat american corps, I'm afraid the chances are nil. Even if a good amount for you is peanuts to them.
Don't know. A company can have a huge valuation on the stock market but that does not necessarily mean that they have cash to pay wages or can afford to pay a large team. If all they have are stocks they have to find somebody that buys those stocks with cash, then find a way not to run out of those money before selling more stocks. Eventually do an exit and stop worrying or become profitable.
I have always preferred permissive over copy-left, because I've historically been unable to use packages at work, which puts food in my mouth, as a developer who spends some time contributing to projects, especially those that I use at work.
This has changed everything. AGPL and GFDL from now on.
you're right about MIT vs GPL confusion. people brainwashed themselves into thinking MIT is "more open", because it's more permissive, but it lets others profit off your code without contributing back.
GPL makes them share or pay to relicense, since you own the copyright. with MIT, they don’t need to ask. MIT just benefits big corps. GPL better protects the open-source spirit, and paradoxically, the ownership of your work.
And yes, people being able to use your code for whatever they want is absolutely more open than having restrictions on how/who gets to use it.
One other model that can also work well is to dual license as GPL + commercial, so people who want to publish their work can use the GPL license but you can potentially fund the project from license sales to closed source users using the commercial licensing option. I see this a fair bit in the audio community I work within.
>And yes, people being able to use your code for whatever they want is absolutely more open than having restrictions on how/who gets to use it.
Yes, this is why people should use free not open , and GPL is more free when you report to the entire community otherwise you are in the famous case from a story where an USAian was claiming "Amerika is the land of the free, we are free to own slaves"
If you link against GPL code, your code needs to be GPL compatible. There are some IPC based workarounds, but they are too annoying and slow in most cases.
Yeah, basically MIT is "more open" in the short term, while GPL is more open on the long term. GPL, while restricting some freedoms right now, is actually enabling the remaining freedoms to be sustainable in the future. Very similar to how law enforcement works out with regards to a sustainable society, and how market restrictions work out to create a sustainable and diverse market.
UPDATE: Two people from Anthropic recommended me internally and their HR department already rejected the application. They recommended me for jobs where you need more experience with AI, so I agree that I wasn't a good fit for those positions. Thank you for your recommendations anyways. That was very kind.
A number of other people contacted me with offers so it looks like there will be a happy end to the story :-)
Hey, I really liked the post and especially the title. Quite surreal but also very fitting at the same time. The writing was great too. Hope you keep going. I’d love to read more.
I honestly think this is some system failure, even a Claude based one. I hope someone in the Claude Desktop team sees this and reaches out to you. Cheers!
This lands. I discovered an emergent feature in GTP40 and when I tried to post about it on the developer forum, the spam filter removed my post. I asked GPT40 to rewrite it for me. I posted the update, and got banned. There's too much 'noise'. People like Einstein and Tesla would've gone unnoticed today, as I doubt they would've become "social media influencers" just to promote their ideas.
If we are at the point where a hiring manager for a position deeply related to an open source library is not at least checking if the authors would be interested, I'm not sure.
If they use any form of filtering / evaluation along the line of STAR, the positive way you chose to deal with it plus the outcome of it being a top post on HN should score you half the position already, good luck :)
You should list a pay range unless you want to be ignored. Developers aren't going to go out of their way to play your little game without a carrot on the stick.
I'm disappointed about your resigned, almost subservient tone. This company is profiting immensely off of your work, and they don't even give you the courtesy of a job interview?
~~Have you considered a copyleft licence like LGPL?~~ Answered in a sibling comment
> This company is profiting immensely off of your work
I wouldn’t say that’s exactly the case. Not to denigrate the author or anything, but this library is a relatively minor part of what Anthropic is doing. It’s a UI manipulation library, specifically one that simulates keyboard and mouse inputs. While something like that is certainly necessary for the project in question, it’s not anything that couldn’t be rewritten in-house without too much difficulty, especially since they’re only using a subset of the platforms supported by the library.
I’m sure that working on this project has provided the author with expertise in this area that Anthropic could benefit from, and so in that sense it’s still a shame that they wouldn’t give him an interview, but that’s really all that can be said about it.
> it’s not anything that couldn’t be rewritten in-house without too much difficulty
This is my experience, at every group I’ve been in. Extending the date a bit is much easier than involving legal for approving a new library.
The group I’m in now sunk a substantial amount of money into a lawsuit for a library that accidentally made its way in, so are now “No LGPL.” with some crazy loops and approvals required if there’s really no alternative (very rare). From their perspective, it’s cheaper and safer to rewrite than not be in compliance, unintentionally or not.
You have to think about other users as well. One person taking advantage of you doesn't mean you have to cut off all the people not taking advantage of you.
Expecting a reward from open source software is a recipe for disappointment. I have contributed code to projects by companies that say I'm a mentally-ill household object. I'm not going to change the license of my open source projects to get back at them, because the collateral damage against entities that aren't evil simply isn't worth it. (It's also somewhat unlikely that the people working on NTP servers at Facebook wrote those policies, so...)
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:
I’d strongly recommend trying again and reaching out to the friend of a friend who informed you of the role and asking for a more direct intro to the hiring manager. Unfortunately, it’s really really easy to slip through the cracks as a resume, and one feels no remorse rejecting a pdf file. Even without the warm contact, some way of directly reaching the hiring manager (notably: not the recruiters!) would mean that “I wrote that library!@ becomes front-and-center, not buried as a line item. I’ve seen so much more success with myself and the people I know in cold or warm outreach than through job application portals. In fact, I’ve yet to get a callback from a single job I’ve ever applied to online!
As an aside, does anyone know why the AI labs have such bad recruiters? I successfully got a job at one and am currently working there, but I still have many many complaints about the process.
Anthropic has a tough alignment interview. Like I aced the coding screener but got rejected after a chat about values. I think they want intense people on the value/safety side as well as the chops.
You need to be insanely dedicated to burning rainforests and boiling oceans so that people can have AI write emails that other people will use AI to summarise and never even read the summary.
What does Blockchain have to do with the energy usage of Microsoft's computing centres?
Are you trying to downplay the compute required to train and run inference on these large language models by stringing together some contrived comparison to the now 'uncool' Blockchain technology? That would be absurd.
Probably alignment with mission. The siblings write a lot about it so read all that. I prepped but I missed the mark. I suspect because of doing too ordinary work so I didn't have examples that would make them think "damm this person gets us".
Some one who reads the company website and has the communication skills to be able to convincingly regurgitate the company stances on issues. Come on guys, this isn’t some FBI lie detector test, they are going to ask you the same exact question people BS on in every interview to top companies, medical schools, etc.
Don’t be naive, these companies don’t care about talent they care about prestige and credentials. <username>@standford will always beat “did actual work relevant to the project”.
Just look at the background of some of the names in this at these places. As always it’s “who you know and where you’ve been” not “what you know and what you’ve built”
edit: You can downvote if you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that high stakes tech has never been a meritocracy and AI companies are no different.
I mean, there are three serious top level AI companies, and the only thing they're competing on right now is the quality of their frontier models. Or arguably their ability to raise cash, in an extremely "buzzy" market....
There's definitely more than 3 companies competing for AI talent and you know that very well.
Nvidia, Apple, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Tesla, Microsoft, Mistral and dozens and dozens of well funded AI startups are just among those with more resources.
Apple Tesla and Microsoft arguably really don't count. Microsoft is selling shovels. Tesla is, well, Tesla. Apple is not competing on frontier models, far as i can tell
As it stands right now, if the code was under a GPL license, nothing stops them paying the author to get it under another license.[1]
Sure, they could offer a job as payment for said license, or just pay cash.
This approach would be "necessary" (for some definition of necessary) for GPL code, but isn't necessary for MIT code.
[1] this assumes there's 1 (or nearly 1) copyright owner. If there are multiple contributors, and no CUA in place, this approach is generally not possible.
Personally, and different people have strong feelings on this both ways, with GPL code I'd get contributors to sign a CUA. It keeps the door open for commercial opportunities like this, especially if the code is "mostly yours".
I guess with a benign modification it does work: it’s just dual licensed (a)gpl and commercial license, the latter available when offered a job. The former always available but of course they’d have to release their entire stack’s source, which Anthropic almost certainly wouldn’t want to do. That’s not OP’s fault though and the license stands as pure (a)gpl.
It would be very, very hard to make this work in practice.
What does it mean to offer a job? Can they offer a job that pays a dollar a year and call it a day? Or can you force them to offer you a job that pays a billion dollars a year?
Can they offer you a job, but only in Antarctica? What about visa sponsorship?
Of course, you can write whatever ill conceived terms you want in your license. But if your license is badly written, any decent company lawyer would strongly advice staying away from your code. And if that's the outcome you want: you might as well open source it with a 'non-commercial use only' license.
> That actually doesn't sound so bad. (Designing the job requirements!)
Well, it's similar to having a license that allows the author to decide on the price of the product after the other side has decided to buy it. There just won't be any buyers.
> Hah. Well it is now...just copy & paste the GPL's text and append that one condition.
Section 7 of the GPL (version 3) explicitly gives the user the right to remove that additional condition. So if you want it to be effective, you will at the least need to remove section 7 from your copied GPL. Then, you'll need to remove the preamble and instructions to avoid the Free Software Foundation's ire (they're being generous in allowing you to modify the license test at all).
Ultimately, it goes against the spirit of the GPL so much (and against the point of FOSS in general) that it would be entirely unjustifiable to use the GPL as the foundation for such a proprietary, source-available licence.
The FSF holds the copyright to the text of the GPL, and they allow anyone to freely redistribute verbatim copies, but they don't permit just anyone to create derivatives.
It is probably a bit late for that, as the company could simply use an earlier release, that was still under MIT license and develop it from there. They would have to maintain it of course, but if they are truly unwilling to hire, they might just do that. Nevertheless it would be a good move to move to a copyleft libre license.
Interesting, considering that Anthropic spends a lot of resourced to build ethics checks into their AI. I wonder if this hiring process was ever put through its own ethics check.
When you apply, you have to confirm that you did not generate the application with AI. As soon as you send of the application, you get an automatic email confirming your application. They also say they don't reach out, if you are not a good match and that they only contact the people they want to hire. Maybe they changed their mind on that policy, because I received a rejection letter a few months later. It was very well written. The people I showed it to said it is one of the nicest rejection letters they have seen.
There's no ethical principle which requires them to hire somebody if they use OSS from that person. Maybe they missed out on a good hire, c'est la vie.
Keep in mind that they probably use it or at least discovered it explicitly because it's open source. So either you don't release it and they use something else, or you release it and they use it. Option 2 sounds like giving you more exposure and more opportunities in the long run.
Sure, it would be hard to monetize and while it took countless hours to iron out many of its bugs, it is definitely not rocket science. I contribute to open source software expecting nothing in return because all software I use is also open source. It's my way of giving back and I love the knowledge that it is useful to people and hearing about their projects. So far I did not have any benefits from it but continue doing it anyways. It makes me happy to see more and more people using it.
I don’t really know what you’re talking about or how it’s relevant (I know you’re referring to an incident that happened outside of HN).
The guidelines clearly ask us to “be kind” and to not “fulminate”. Your comment was flagged by several community members so there’s a pretty strong consensus that it’s not what we want on HN.
That's...wow. What an absolutely disappointing reply.
If "be kind" is an actual value of HN I have yet to see it in almost 15 years of being active on this forum. This community is generally speaking not kind and fulminating is de rigeur as far as I've been able to surmise.
But whatever. I won't bother you or anyone else on here anymore. Good riddance.
You’re disappointed to discover after 15 years that we expect people to try to be kind and to avoid fulmination? I’m not sure what kind of forum you want this to be, but the guidelines have been pretty consistent about those things for much or all of that time, as has the approach to moderation. Yes people breach the guidelines all the time. That doesn’t stop us reminding people of them and continuing to aim for better. You’re always welcome here if you respect the community and want to make the effort to respect the guidelines.
(So far as I can tell I have never said the words "die slow" in my life. I think you have me confused with someone else; my hip hop conversance begins and ends with Tribe and De La Soul. It's "Thomas", by the way.)
I'm not advocating in doing it for the exposure as a primary reason. And absolutely not to be paid in exposure. 100% agree with the comic there.
I should not have used that word. It is clearly charged with negativity.
Of course I wish everyone would be compensated for their work. I feel that for some types of project, publishing as open source is a great way for people to find and use it. This can give new opportunities.
Exactly which kind of project and under which conditions is up to debate.
I have worked on a few projects that I regret not being able to open source. Mainly not my choice, stakeholders wanted traditional go to market strategies and failed/ran out of money trying to make sales. I can't help but thinking what other opportunities could have arisen have we chose another strategy.
How curious! So am I, and that is the project that I am the closest to regretting open sourcing.
I made the mistake of also implementing keyboard and mouse monitoring---you know, so I could write automated tests for the input parts!---and over the years it has turned into an endless source of feature requests, bug reports and also general questions about the Python programming language and its ecosystem.
Input events truly are horrible to provide a platform independent abstraction over, but in the end seeing people use it, make YouTube tutorials and discuss it on Stack Overflow make it worth the time spent.
You should have licensed it under AGPL; Anthropic then would have reached you to negotiate a commercial license or contribute back to the project, since AGPL forces server-side code disclosures when deployed. Without that, they can legally use, modify, and profit from it without sharing improvements or compensating you
OP mentioned he took over an existing project. He would then have to track all the people who contributed in order to be able to relicense to AGPL. Even then, Anthropic would probably then write their own.
[A]GPL is like kryptonite to corporations. Very few will take the risk of having to open their own code if someone made a mistake in isolating the GPLed code properly, so most ban the use of GPL for their products and services.
Anthropic would have found a different library or rolled their own, rather than taking that risk. If the library was fundamental, maybe they'd go for a commercial license, but that's usually an option of last resort.
what's to stop them from <prompt>Recreate this library so that I can use it in my project without fear of copyright violation.</prompt> in their very own claude code?
For small enough codebases, that seems like an inevitable reality, eventually.
If you have nearly limitless compute to throw at an issue and a good enough model, then it should be able to create enough test cases to cover most aspects of the codebase (iterating thousands of times until it gets it right) and then eventually write a new implementation in a new language or a slightly different tech stack that passes all of the original tests, alongside a few more hundreds of iterations of refactoring.
I give it a decade until large orgs are doing that to avoid licensing restrictions and other liabilities.
It might even be a boon for security that many organizations have independent implementations of core code projects, even possibly the OS. In such a hypothetical world, security issues that are implementation dependent would not affect such large swaths of the installed software.
If you feed it the library to recreate then this seems like it would necessarily be a derivative work and thus copyright infringement. Proving that they did it may be a challenge...
> Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo. I wrote a cover letter and sent out my application. An automatic reply informed me that they might take some time to respond and that they only notify applicants if they made it to the next round. After a few weeks without an answer, I had assumed they chose other applicants.
Wait, so, if it was a friend-of-a-friend situation, why did you not try to get a referral?
I've stopped applying to the big companies long time ago precisely because I'd never hear back regardless of the match or the credentials (the only exception has been JaneStreet — they contacted me almost right away after a cold application), yet going the referral route, it's relatively easy to get an interview almost anywhere.
I’m unsure if you’re being serious or making a joke. If you depend on something, it is in your best interest to have it continue and remain in good shape. What better way to ensure that then to pay the salary of the creator and world’s utmost expert on the thing? As a bonus, it ensures your specific needs about the thing are addressed in a timely manner.
Making something open source has no bearing on your future employment. Certainly, it is great to have something on the resume that is used internally, but to have an _expectation_ that someone would hire you for that reason, is beyond my imagination.
It’s weirder because it doesn’t even seem like he initially wrote it, just took over a abandoned project, changed some code, and think he deserves a job because of it.
I think so too. It helps to form good habits. If you have a roommate for example, you can't leave your dirty dishes everywhere and need to clean it as soon as you are done. You can learn a lot from your roommates too. One of my ex flatmates was super crafty and I got a different perspective on things thanks to that.
I used to live in a flat with one flatmate who changed every half a year or so because they were usually interns. Never knew them before they moved in but 90% of the time we became friends. I liked that they changed after a while so I was never stuck with a bad roomate.
I don't recommend the other way around. If you have a good friend it's more likely to notice their annoying habits so there is little upside but in a worse case you can damage the friendship.
