We Love Open Source Software. No, You Can’t Have Our Code

The Code4Lib Journal has an interesting article examining 6 reasons why institutions don't contribute back to open source communities. While written from the perspective of libraries, many readers will recognize these reasons in operation elsewhere. The reasons given are:

1. perfectionism: unless the code is perfect, we don’t want anyone to see it


2. dependency: if we share this with you, you will never leave us alone


3. quirkiness: we’d gladly share, but we can’t since we’re so weird


4. redundancy: we think your project is neat, but we can do better


5. competitiveness: we want to be the acknowledged leader


6. misunderstanding: a fundamental inability to understand how an open source community works