Did not like. About half the things on that list will cause releasing something to take longer. Every day you delay trying to make your code "pretty" for other potential developers is a day your competitors gain on you.
Also the open source benefits are claimed as a fact, i.e. you open source and this is what you get. But that's not how it works. Have a look at freshmeat, sourceforge, etc. at all the abandoned projects. If you open source your code you wont automatically get coders dreaming of making your code better. You might if you become popular on your own but if you can become popular on your own do you really need open source?
Is the potential that if you do everything right someone might write Instapaper integration for you worth the potential that competitors might harvest the best part of your app and create a product from it that takes all your sales?
Open source has its place to be sure and I contribute when I can. I just don't think it's place is "everywhere".
> About half the things on that list will cause releasing something to take longer. Every day you delay trying to make your code "pretty" for other potential developers is a day your competitors gain on you.
Excuse me? Shouldn't you normally make your code pretty enough for you and other developers inhouse to support?
Agreed. I think on the continuum from general infrastructure kind of code to end user applications, the place of open source is on the infrastructure end. It's useful to opensource code that many people can and should reuse.
"Every day you delay trying to make your code "pretty" for other potential developers is a day your competitors gain on you."
So ... Don't make your code "pretty"? Perhaps instead you should focus on making your code easy for other people to work on. You don't intend on always being the only person working on it do you?
I've done the open source app thing before. It can be fulfilling on some sort of karmic level, but unless you happen to crank out the next Apache or Linux, it is almost certainly not going to be a way for you to make any sort of living. At best, you'll get to claim it for credit on your résumé.
It depends on what your time is worth. Like I said, you my find it emotionally gratifying to release your application's source code as open source. In which case it very well may be "worth it" to you.
However, I'll stand by my point that it is very, very difficult to extract significant income from the average open source project.
I think the "open source everything" movement is misguided. Open source generally doesn't work well for anything except for very large "community projects". I've seen it countless times -- one highly skilled coder can often out-code an entire community by several fold. "Build by committee" results in a large, slow-evolving codebase that never gets finished. Whereas a web app or iPhone game need to be built fast, and with a clear vision. In general, open sourcing it will just slow the project down, and now you have a human resource problem on your hands, and you need to deal with poorly written code being patched into your project. It's an overhead that's not worth it when the project owner can usually code the bug fixes, and features faster than any outsider can.
Also the open source benefits are claimed as a fact, i.e. you open source and this is what you get. But that's not how it works. Have a look at freshmeat, sourceforge, etc. at all the abandoned projects. If you open source your code you wont automatically get coders dreaming of making your code better. You might if you become popular on your own but if you can become popular on your own do you really need open source?
Is the potential that if you do everything right someone might write Instapaper integration for you worth the potential that competitors might harvest the best part of your app and create a product from it that takes all your sales?
Open source has its place to be sure and I contribute when I can. I just don't think it's place is "everywhere".