> Because I was so annoyed by the lack of contribution, despite the obvious signals that people were using the software, I (eventually) realized that my true goal was for people to interact with my code, not my program.
That's a neat observation. My theory -- hard to prove -- would be that if you leave the code open for long enough (regardless or not of whether you pay attention to contributions, and how many of them there are), you'll find some keen soul further down the road who finds and repairs some kind of compatibility issue, security/privacy problem, or similar.
> So few users care if a project is open or not that they can safely be ignored as a rounding error.
I can near-guarantee that for users who understand that software can do whatever it wants on their system, within the capabilities of the runtime environment and as instructed, then when those users are provided with the option to be able to see the corresponding code or not, they'll choose to have it available to them. In an enterprise context: it can sway vendor selection.
That's an increasing percentage of users today, I think. Perhaps it was the case a decade or two ago that people thought of software as windowed applications on their desktop; nowadays I reckon that more people have software developers within their extended social networks, and from that exposure they have a little bit more of a sense for how computers and code work.
And in response to one of your parent comments:
> I didn't like that view of myself, so I stopped opening my software.
Totally understandable. Don't forget the fact that you have an opportunity (not a responsibility, by any means) to teach and share code with current and future generations of developers.
They might discover some relevant snippet of yours through code search and find exactly what they need to solve a problem. Perhaps they'll credit you; perhaps they won't (perhaps they won't realize or be in the mindset that it's worthwhile (and/or important) to credit people for their work) - either way you'll have helped someone with their day.
That's a neat observation. My theory -- hard to prove -- would be that if you leave the code open for long enough (regardless or not of whether you pay attention to contributions, and how many of them there are), you'll find some keen soul further down the road who finds and repairs some kind of compatibility issue, security/privacy problem, or similar.
> So few users care if a project is open or not that they can safely be ignored as a rounding error.
I can near-guarantee that for users who understand that software can do whatever it wants on their system, within the capabilities of the runtime environment and as instructed, then when those users are provided with the option to be able to see the corresponding code or not, they'll choose to have it available to them. In an enterprise context: it can sway vendor selection.
That's an increasing percentage of users today, I think. Perhaps it was the case a decade or two ago that people thought of software as windowed applications on their desktop; nowadays I reckon that more people have software developers within their extended social networks, and from that exposure they have a little bit more of a sense for how computers and code work.
And in response to one of your parent comments:
> I didn't like that view of myself, so I stopped opening my software.
Totally understandable. Don't forget the fact that you have an opportunity (not a responsibility, by any means) to teach and share code with current and future generations of developers.
They might discover some relevant snippet of yours through code search and find exactly what they need to solve a problem. Perhaps they'll credit you; perhaps they won't (perhaps they won't realize or be in the mindset that it's worthwhile (and/or important) to credit people for their work) - either way you'll have helped someone with their day.