| "you get periodic free testing, enhancements, and bugfixes from your users" The amount of this is miniscule, in my experience; not only that, but the level of testing and quality of bugfixes is usually so low that it's more efficient to not bother reading emails like that at all. I guess it's different for bigger/other projects, although the dozens of mailing lists I've been on over the years haven't shown many differences. "but secondly if you contribute it upstream your patch becomes someone else's problem" This, too, is vastly overstated. I have contributed dozens of patches over the years that were just left in bug trackers or tracs, or were ignored on mailing lists - sometimes because nobody cares, sometimes because people just like to hack on their own use cases instead of somebody else's problems, sometimes because its against the (usually unstated) 'philosophy' of the software. Not to be negative, there are many useful open source projects, and I use many. But they're usually run by one or a few highly committed people. I too have a bunch of projects in local repositories - I don't see any reason to open them up. A bunch of projects out there with no activity for 3 years looks quite bad too - once you start advertising your public repos, you have to keep up on them. The trade off is usually not worth it for me (for new projects, that is - I keep the ones I've worked on in the past on the web). |