[pentamassiv]

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

[mystraline]

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.

[evanelias]

> 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.

[foxglacier]

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.

[captainbland]

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.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Do you feel like Claptrap did?[0].

In all seriousness, good work. Sorry about the rejection, but it reminds me of the story about the Homebrew guy getting rejected by Google[1].

[0] https://youtu.be/hDzWw5rfefQ

[1] https://x.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

[riedel]

Also Microsoft and AppGet:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287

[gherkinnn]

I have fond memories of playing Claptrap in Borderlands Presequel. None of my friends do though, his vaulthunter.EXE ability made few friends.

[JdeBP]

As discussed at length on this page at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808807 .

[fenomas]

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..)

[archon810]

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?

[lo_zamoyski]

It might have been the motivation behind the post in the first place, though not without risk.

[trueismywork]

Do you think that making your product AGPL would being you more money/recognition/jobs for your effort?

[pentamassiv]

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.

[4gotunameagain]

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.

Which is why my position is GPL > MIT..

[mnmalst]

They could literally give him 100k, 1mil or even 10mil which would still be a rounding error in their books.

[zamalek]

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.

[kome]

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.

[pentamassiv]

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 :-)

[lagniappe]

Thank you for your service

[tkdb]

Fun write up, lovely irony (if your work did actually help AI auto-reject you).

If I was you, I would probably feel similar "you used my project, you probably want to hire me!"

But there's a logical fallacy there.

Your creation being useful to a person or company ≠ you being a fit to work with/for them full time.

Still, you deserved human eyes on the question from their side.

[131012]

Since you're asking: I took a pause mid-reading and told myself: "Woah, I like their writing style."

[pentamassiv]

Wow, what a great compliment. Thank you :-)

[seanw265]

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.

[FrustratedMonky]

I hope that was just an auto-reply rejection, that it got caught in the HR bureaucracy, and some human developer sees this and re-considers.

[null_deref]

It was a fun and easy read

[brainless]

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!

[robpanico333]

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.

[htrp]

edison was pretty good at self promo

[gwbas1c]

I wonder if it's useful for you to put a few subtle "hire me"s on your repo, mailing list, ect?

[xico]

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.

[utbabya]

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 :)

[AndrewKemendo]

Can you please send me your resume:

[e-mail]

[archon810]

Are you the head of AI at a military contractor? This is probably information you should disclose when asking people to send you their resumes.

[bigyabai]

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.

[andrepd]

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

[zoky]

> 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.

[jrockway]

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...)