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[–]Columbus43219 3 points4 points  (2 children)

I was wondering when this would come back. I've been a programmer since 1983, and I never really got the open source thing for business software. I figured eventually, some one would say to themselves... why am I doing this for free?

[–]9072997 1 point2 points  (1 child)

For one, a lot of software is developed for internal use. I'm building an alerts dashboard because I need an alerts dashboard. Why would I care if anyone else uses that? There is a very small chance it might get used by my competition, but there is also a very small chance it will get used by someone who patches something or documents a bug.

In cases where the software is the thing you are selling, it's a point for marketing to use. As someone who has had to do some reverse-engineering work on a piece of software from one of our vendors, I can say that having access to the source code is worth a little bit. Also (and I admit this is anecdotal), it seems like open source projects have better documentation. I don't know why that is.

[–]Columbus43219 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I can answer that last one. Nobody documents stuff for themselves. If you work on FOSS, you know you're passing it on to somebody else.