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Corporate Open Source Anti-patterns

4 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this talk2 months2014–2023 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters invoke it whenever a company relicenses, forks, or announces an open source plan, and enjoy Cantrill's energetic, opinionated delivery.

Bryan Cantrill's talk on corporate open source anti-patterns, first given at FISL 2012 and again at the Liferay Symposium. He lays out the mistakes companies make when open sourcing code, such as announcing future open sourcing, and discusses licenses.

“Bryan Cantrill had an insightful talk "Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns” (HN, 2023)

2 recommendations · 5 citations · Talks · intermediate

7 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@kakwa_ Mar 2019 Recommends
on HN thread Warren Buffett Joins the Crowd Struggling to Understand Oracle
Just yesterday I came across one of his other videos, and I guess Bryan Cantrill still as a bit of grudge against Oracle: Light ranting: [this video] A bit heavier ranting (with the fallout after his usenix ranting): [this video] Selected quote: "Any explanation of Oracle that doesn't end with a nazi allegory does not fully explain Oracle" Bryan Cantrill is really fun to listen to, is a tech veteran now, and is still as passionate and energetic as he was the first day (Another interesting video about programming languages he experienced during his (long by tech standards) career: [link] )
Cantrill is a passionate, entertaining speaker with sharp views on Oracle.
@geerlingguy Aug 2023 Recommends
on HN thread CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association
Bryan Cantrill had an insightful talk "Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns" surrounding events from 8-12 years ago, and all I'll say is history definitely echoes sometimes: [this video]
Insightful talk whose lessons echo current corporate open source events.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@bcantrill Dec 2014 Cites it
on HN thread Node.js is forked, not fucked
Read more
This piece is (by far) the best written on the io.js fork and its ramifications. As I have said many times before, we are forkaphilic[1] -- forking is healthy because it allows (and encourages) experimentation with divergent ideas. The primary idea that io.js appears to be experimenting with is "more frequent releases", in particular very closely tracking V8. This is somewhat ironic because the close tracking of V8 has been a major contributing factor to the delay in 0.12: despite good intentions, V8 breaks node.js frequently -- and debugging those problems is a time-consuming and arduous task requiring a great deal of technical sophistication. We have made clear that our technical priorities for the project are production-grade stability and performance; to the degree that other have different priorities, forking should be encouraged. In part to allow cross-pollination from any fork, we eliminated our CLA earlier this year[2]; the community can rest assured that good ideas from either will be able to be in both. [1] [this video] [2] [link]
Cantrill talk cited for the idea that forking is healthy.
@Flenser Apr 2015 Cites it
on HN thread Release proposal: v2.0.0 (io.js)
I hope Bryan Cantrill will do a follow up of sorts to Corporate Open Source Anti-patterns[1] once this is all settled. It would be interesting to know what lessons there are to learn from this. [1] [this video]
Cantrill's talk cited as basis for hoping for a follow-up.
@foxhop Jun 2015 Cites it
on HN thread “Swift will be open source later this year”
[this video] this is a talk by Joyant's Bryan Cantrill where he make the case that announcing something is going to be open sourced in the future is bad and is an anti pattern.
Talk arguing that announcing future open sourcing is an anti-pattern.
@mh8h Feb 2016 Cites it
on HN thread GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux
I agree, many of the open source licenses are not pairwise-compatible. But the fact that GPL is a strong copyleft license makes collaboration more difficult. And the idea that CDDL was made specifically to be incompatible with GPL is at best a speculation. See Bryan Cantrill's video about the history of Solaris [0] and about different licenses [1] [0] [link] [1] [this video]
Cited for Cantrill's discussion of different open source licenses.
@geerlingguy Aug 2023 Cites it
on HN thread HashiCorp Adopts Business Source License
This is one of the Corporate Open Source anti-patterns Bryan Cantrill mentions in his talk a number of years ago: [this video] It always feels scummy having to assign copyright for my own contributions to a big company.
Talk names this pattern among corporate open source anti-patterns.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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