[petercooper]

I know this isn't a general rule, but based on my experiences with proprietary projects, even with the best of intentions most became a jenga-esque pile of hacks and shortcuts that few developers would want to show off in public even if the overall system works well.

[mooreds]

> most became a jenga-esque pile of hacks and shortcuts that few developers would want to show off in public

Not just that they don't want to "show off", but even more that they don't think it will be useful.

It takes a non zero amount of work to document a project such that it can be used and extended by someone who didn't write it.

[mcbits]

I'm a proponent of publishing code that's useless, obsolete, buggy, poorly documented, etc, if the rights holders are so inclined. The reason is that I think it can still be useful as training data for, say, designing new programming languages/tools around coding patterns seen in the wild.

[mooreds]

If you have a product people have paid money for, and say you're releasing it as open source because it isn't sustainable, the people looking for that code aren't typically interested "training data".

I get your point that messy code may be useful for other purposes, but believe that the vast majority of users are looking for code to solve their problems, not "training data" or research.

That said, as you say, rights holders can do what they will.

[mcbits]

Yep, I'm just saying that if someone can and wants to release their code, they shouldn't let "is this even useful to anyone?" stop them. It could turn out to be useful in ways that nobody has foreseen.

[stevenwiles]

> The reason is that I think it can still be useful as training data for, say, designing new programming languages/tools around coding patterns seen in the wild.

Do you happen to have any evidence of that ever being done even once in the history of mankind?

It's a nice idea, but you should know by now the world isn't a slave to your desires.

[mcbits]

Here is some evidence of mining source code for common structure and idioms. I didn't even have to dust off my bull whip: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/csutton/publications/idioms.pd...

I don't have evidence of this approach actually being used to inform language or tool design, but it's not like it's an outrageous concept that nobody's thought of before. Your hostility is perplexing.

[nulltype]

Any examples of some successful open source dumps of proprietary projects? By dump I mean they just release the code with no docs or support.

The only one I can think of is id software, but they spent some time to clean it up I think. Also their products are games and already very popular.

[mcbits]

No examples come to mind of someone just releasing a bunch of proprietary code without some effort involved. But people sometimes poke fun at the Apache Foundation as a place for companies to wash their hands of old code that they don't want to keep maintaining, and there are some success stories there.