You don’t have to tell me not to be embarrassed about my code, I’ve been a professional software developer for many many years, I don’t give a shit about what people think about my code. But I was once young and I can understand that mindset.

The points about the tools that GitHub gives you is valid, even though not all open source software goes through GitHub. My personal experience with abandoning my project was way before GitHub was popular and I wasn’t even using git as a versioning tool. Git being popular is a more recent thing. And the tools available like on GitHub have come a long way. You are however bypassing the human part. It isn’t about the tools or what should be done or what could be done. It’s about the human factor. Sure you can just put your head in the sand and say NO, my code, my rules. But the expectation is there, that’s what I was getting at. The minute you open source your code, unless you just post it in a zip file as is (which is technically making it open source but not very useful), the expectation is you become a project manager and a community manager even more than you already are. If the goal is just having a bit of fun programming for a hobby, that usually isn’t what people want.

Things like archiving and finding maintainers is all well and good, but in reality with smaller projects the chance there is someone with enough in depth knowledge to really take over is very small. It happens, but so many projects get abandoned. When searching on for example GitHub for something I come across countless of projects with last commits 5+ years ago and when I check out the code it needs major work to get it up to date and compatible. Ecosystems change and dead code isn’t all that useful. Reading code is also very hard and when you are faced with a major overhaul and in depth study on top of the changes you probably need to make to make it work for you, the choice to just begin from scratch is a very easy one. Plus many developers have not-invented-here syndrome, so that’s a thing.

The situation I described happens almost daily and I’ve seen it more than a couple of times myself. When it’s a big project, everyone knows about it and reads the threads. When it’s a tiny project, nobody cares enough. But when it’s intermediate, with a small community, this happens all the time. And if you aren’t part of that community, you’d never know about it happening. More often than not the end result is a nuke from orbit situation (only way to be sure), so there isn’t anything to read after. With bigger projects I also wouldn’t say it’s rare, those just handle it better, because they usually have good community managers who step in and prevent escalation.

That being said, don’t take anything I’ve said as a con against the principle of open source. It may or may not be the best way and this isn’t anything critical about the principle itself. Just some examples of why someone might not want to open source their project and my first hand experience about deciding not to open source it.

If I were faced with the same decision today, I might decide differently. On the other hand, the past couple of years have taught me a large part of humanity is awful and the internet is rapidly devolving into a big stinky pile of shit I want nothing to do with. Being a Reddit refugee on Lemmy is probably my last attempt at any social media, if the whole Lemmy thing doesn’t work out, I’ll leave the internet as a active user and become lurker only. Even then I’ll limit my exposure as just simply being on the internet as bad for your mental health IMHO.