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em-beetoday at 1:08 PM1 replyview on HN

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.


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martin-ttoday at 2:25 PM

> 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.