[Locke]

I think this observation is very true with respect to sharing with the internet at large. It's easy to dismiss some new (personal) discovery as unremarkable or obvious -- but, there are probably people out there who would find a write-up of that discovery interesting. This is probably especially true about more domain-specific bits of knowledge.

In that case, I don't think not sharing is an intentional choice to withhold or hoard information. The individual simply didn't realize there was any demand for that information. Or, perhaps there wasn't enough value in that information because anyone with an interest would make the same discovery on their own easily enough.

It doesn't mean that the same individual wouldn't share that info with someone who asked directly about the subject.

[Locke1689]

I find this true not on the Internet more often. For example, one of my friends asked me to describe what I was working on and how it worked. I was perfectly willing to get him up to speed -- until I realized what I was stepping into. My current project was designing and implementing a hardware virtualization support layer. One of the reasons why I was so reluctant to help him was I realized exactly what kind of "background information" (as the article says) I was using in the project.

First, I would have to teach him how virtualization and virtual machine monitors work. But before that, I would have to teach him how modern operating systems work. Well, before that I would have to teach how modern hardware works. Even if we get through all that I'd still have to teach him IA32e assembler and POSIX standard C (he only knew C++). After realizing that, I told him I'd help if he took a couple more courses and later decided he still wanted to know. In this case I would have to say that I did intentionally withhold information, but only because I didn't want to give an incomplete picture.

P.S. You stole my username ;)