[Software Idea Sharing in the Open Source Space: The Inventor’s Dilemma]

Hi Mediumers, story time!

[January 17, 2024]
I was on an emergency phone call with my startup co-founder just a few days ago, right before heading back to Taipei from my visit to DC. One of my business partners had just sent a link to a code repository that had the exact same name as our repository, which immediately caught my eye, so I checked into it. Upon first inspection, I perceived it to have a similar project functionality. It took EXACTLY THE SAME WEBSITE DOMAIN that was available just a couple months ago — the very one that I was planning on purchasing. And not only that, the code for this apparent spinoff project was first released less than two months ago, which is 6 months after we released ours. But get this. *Theirs* (undisclosed identity) had already received 35000 stars, indicating that the repository is likely already in use by upwards of a million users (which is about a million users more than the number of users our project has). The first thought that came was — “Did they give us any credit?”

So let me rewind and tell you where this all got started.

As I suppose you can guess from the title, I fancy myself an inventor, and if I had to describe my number one skill in software development teams, it would definitely be the inventor role. The person that comes up with the initial idea for products that the team then builds together.