Why open source it? And how to get real involvement?
- by donpal
For me the main goal of open sourcing something is collaboration. If the most that other developers are going to do is take it and use it and report bugs to me, then I might as well close source it. Closed source provides me with all that.
I was recently looking at a small javascript library (or more like a plugin, 1000 lines of code) that's actually quite popular. There were some bugs in it because new browsers and browser versions get released everyday and these bugs just pop up as a result. What bothered me is that these bugs would actually be quite easy to fix by even intermediate javascript developers, but for an entire month no one stepped up to fix the bug and submit the fixed version. The original author was apparently busy for that month, but that's the point of open sourcing your code: so that others can use it and help themselves AND the project if they can.
So this makes me doubt the promise of open source. If people aren't working on it too, I might as well close source my new projects. And how do you get people involved so that open sourcing is worth it?
