Why do Open Source?

For me, it's mostly avoiding the hassle of commercializing something. If I'm never going to try to sell it, I might as well give away the source. Also, there's not really much choice when a lot of what you do is in perl or ruby or ... -- just about anything but c/c++.

How I got started is another story. I switched to linux because windows drove me crazy. Then Gnome and KDE drove me crazy. Then xfce drove me crazy. It became apparent that I had very specific needs, and nothing available was going to fill them. So, I chose something close to what I wanted (fluxbox) and started fixing things. Thus, I guess you could say I started because I'm picky.

The author makes a blanket assumption that because you release something as open source, you will get feedback from other developers. From experience this will not happen unless the project reaches critical mass. Even then, the ratio of people that help to the people to use the software is always huge.

Some of his arguments for releasing open source are very weak, excused documentation and liberation from delivery schedules especially.

The authors main open source example is Pantheios which is a library. There is no market for libraries. Using an open source library to enable consulting gigs is a common business strategy.

This posting is fairly weak.

To learn something new that I wouldn't otherwise get a chance to learn. And to scratch an itch.

I wanted to learn Python. And I wanted a clock and a weather applet in the Avant Window Navigator (a dock for Linux). The opportunity was too good to pass up... I wrote them myself.