My personal habit would be to protect my intellectual property until I'd established a market position.
Or to only publish the core bits, like we're doing with our SDK.
Discussion
not going to work with bitcoin et al
instant distrust from everyone
personally i don't want any binary only stuff on my device if i can avoid it... and actually, i think the only such things i have are games, but at the same time many game companies have found it helps their sales by enabling devs to extend the game... look at the Source engine and all the things that have come out of that
a game that is noncompetitive is fine to be closed source because it is of little consequence
really, competitive games need to be open source too or else you get the endless bleat of gamers saying that the system is cheating them
security by obscurity doesn't work, this has been proven over and over again, and almost always, bad things are hiding in closed source binary blobs, just like Luxferre says
This isn't "security by obscurity", it's "protecting trade secrets" as an alternative to using the court system to enforce patents and licenses. Lots of open-source libraries are protected by licenses, so you can't legally fork and build off of them for a paid product.
But we can study these libraries and decide whether or not to trust them.
Those "trade secrets" often contain algorithms taken from FOSS or ripped from other companies' software.
I guess this issue will only be over once IT businesses will be obliged (by regulations or by natural selection — time will tell) to sell real work, not thin air in the shape of binary copies and license keys.
But the sad truth is, more and more companies just use this "trade secrets" excuse to conceal their own (or govt-issued, who knows) malware in their products. Oftentimes, they don't even try to hide this in their EULAs, which basically say "once you install this on your computer, it's no longer yours but ours".
Many Faildows users still don't realize how large of a technogenic catastrophe this could cause if M$ decides to flip the switch.
not just microsoft but a whole heap of companies have embedded backdoors and kill switches in everything, they can easily fabricate a "cyber apocalypse" any time they want to
this is part of the reason why it's so important to understand that hiding source code is ALWAYS a red flag, no matter what, no matter what you think about market advantage, these dark places are almost always hiding something and if they aren't, someone will see the opportunity and plant something malicious in there
that's what the original easter egg was too... and the dude that did that did it in protest against the culture of the software company
maybe you don't have bad intentions but hiding your source also enables someone to piggyback on flaws you made in your code that determined hackers can exploit
so, yeah, nah... FOSS for anything that has value, or GTFO