I wonder how many self-conscious developers are out there, that don't release their source code for fear it having glaring flaws that will bring the wrath of their peers upon them.
Count me as one of them. My coding style suits me, but I know it's not for everyone. There's always a balance between writing elegant code, and throwing in a bunch poorly optimised conditional statements just because you are having a bad day and you just want that part of the app/game/whatever to JUST work properly after 5 solid hours of trying to debug it..
Going open source is like letting someone walk around inside your brain; If you are not thick skinned enough it's going to hurt, a lot.
I tried it once, and admittedly I was a much worse coder than I am now - it was my first big personal project (a MUD server) and I basically levelled up my coding skills from 'tinkerer' to 'semi-expert' over the years I was I writing it. When I finally open-sourced it (due to pressure from the community) several people tore it apart, and basically told me I was a shit programmer.
I know a professor working on a potentially important project that won't release his code and I suspect it's precisely for this reason. The communuty would tear him apart for sure, but it would be worthwhile to release it anyway.
This is a real problem in academia and not just because of superficial coding-style issues that the authors might be fearing criticism for. There is a real probability of serious bugs. There have been papers that have had to be retracted because the analysis software used was later discovered to have bugs that caused incorrect results (things being called statistically significant that weren't, and so on).
Lots I suspect. It is actually one of the reasons why I try to stick to "open source by default" in any side projects I might take on. Although it is pretty unlikely as I am a nobody it is theoretically possible that someone may choose to examine my code and I have that knowledge in the back of my head as I work.
Probably a lot. My guess is something similar happens with commercial software. Some commercial software that everybody loves dies, and the community cries out for it to be open sourced. Meanwhile, everyone that ever worked on the codebase is thinking, "You want to see this source? Uhhhhhhh..."
Going open source is like letting someone walk around inside your brain; If you are not thick skinned enough it's going to hurt, a lot.
I tried it once, and admittedly I was a much worse coder than I am now - it was my first big personal project (a MUD server) and I basically levelled up my coding skills from 'tinkerer' to 'semi-expert' over the years I was I writing it. When I finally open-sourced it (due to pressure from the community) several people tore it apart, and basically told me I was a shit programmer.
And that's why I don't do Open Source.