Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

dmazzoni t1_ja0al83 wrote

While /u/Aussie_Mo_Bro's answer is good, I think one piece that needs more explanation is that most programmers make money by selling their time, not by selling their code.

Very few programmers write code to sell directly to customers.

Sure, it happens sometimes. There are some indie apps and games on the app store. And some programmers sell their code. But overall that's not a great way to make money.

Instead, most software that needs to be written - including websites and apps - is a means to an end. Chipotle has an app so that people will buy burritos. Avis has an app so that you can rent a car. Chipotle and Avis each pay lots of programmers to build those apps for them. That's generally how most developers make money.

To repeat: Programmers don't make money by writing code and selling the code. They make money by people paying them to write custom code for them.

So because of that, when a programmer releases something as open-source, they didn't lose anything. The code is already written, it's not going to make them money if they keep it secret.

2

Aussie_Mo_Bro t1_ja262c7 wrote

I've not worked anywhere that doesn't keep the code you write as their property.

Not saying it doesn't happen, and I haven't really been contracting

1

dmazzoni t1_ja3hbrc wrote

Sure, I'm not saying you open source code produced for someone else.

Companies sometimes open-souece code that they need but isn't key to their profit. For example, Facebook open sourced React because they found it to be a useful way to build web frontend but it has nothing to do with their core business. So Facebook gets more out of people freely collaborating on React than they would out of keeping it secret.

1