Way to be! I like this attitude because it's like if you're not going to maintain it or try to profit from it then why keep it to yourself? I'm much the same way. I'm sure we all have little projects that have the potential to make us a few bucks but if you're not willing to keep them up and follow through then you might as well share. Either way it's not like you were going to do anything with them.
And you never know who might want to take over or what kind of great new enhancements someone else might contribute that make you proud that you started the project to begin with. Even if the code languishes on github or sourceforge at least there's the possibility for someone to pick it up. What's more, you never know who's picking up abandoned projects and using them privately. Just because there's no cmaintainer or community activity that doesn't mean there isn't the odd person here and there who finds an abandoned project and uses the hell out of it. Contributions from the open source community isn't the only measure of a project's success or usefulness. Individuals finding a use for abandoned projects without contributing back is still a great thing in my book.
I don't know about everyone else but I do it for the love of the game, not to see my name in the source code of another project that uses my code. As far as I'm concerned, unless I'm planning to make a profit (in which case I wouldn't publish the source), you can fork, close, distribute and charge whatever you want with my code.
The Cassandra project was in really bad shape when FB open sourced it, and it languished like that for several months before Jonathan Ellis picked it up and ran with it. Now it's a thriving Apache project, with contributors from many companies, and even commercial support through DataStax.
Yeah. My favorite example is JS-2 mode[1]. It's a brilliant mode for editing JavaScript released by Steve Yegge. However, it had some shortcomings and (minor) bugs; Yegge did not have time to support it any more.
Then somebody cloned it on GitHub[2], changed the indentation, fixed some bugs and added some features. In the past, using JS-2 mode was a bit of a compromise--intelligence at the cost of weird behavior. Now there is no compromise at all.
Miranda IM (nee Miranda ICQ) didn't become usable or popular until after I gave up on it. I think it's been abandoned at least once again. Several complete different sets of people have been working on it.
Do you also count partly finished projects? I listed some projects [here](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713240). Most of them were extended/improved a lot, e.g. by porting them to other platforms, etc.
The GP never said that open sourcing prevents turning a profit or anything of the sort, just that he/she wouldn't release the source if the goal is to profit from it.
I always get this kind of response whenever I say that. I know you can make a profit with open source code but that's just not my thing nor has anything I've worked on lent itself to that kind of model. I suppose I could have left that phrase out as it really doesn't have much to do with what I was saying and can definitely be taken the wrong way.
And you never know who might want to take over or what kind of great new enhancements someone else might contribute that make you proud that you started the project to begin with. Even if the code languishes on github or sourceforge at least there's the possibility for someone to pick it up. What's more, you never know who's picking up abandoned projects and using them privately. Just because there's no cmaintainer or community activity that doesn't mean there isn't the odd person here and there who finds an abandoned project and uses the hell out of it. Contributions from the open source community isn't the only measure of a project's success or usefulness. Individuals finding a use for abandoned projects without contributing back is still a great thing in my book.
I don't know about everyone else but I do it for the love of the game, not to see my name in the source code of another project that uses my code. As far as I'm concerned, unless I'm planning to make a profit (in which case I wouldn't publish the source), you can fork, close, distribute and charge whatever you want with my code.
I like Alex's style on this one a lot.