I got a lot of questions in the past why I’m not contributing my work to the cocos2d-iphone project.
One of the obvious reasons being that what I did is simply too radical technically and I don’t want to compromise. Another reason being a fundamental difference in attitude towards developing and managing open and closed source projects.
These questions made me wonder - in particular because there was often a notion associated with these questions: because I do so much with cocos2d-iphone I should somehow be obliged to contribute back to it. Weird, right? I am contributing a lot already, just not code to the repository.
So if I don’t contribute (code), why don’t you? Or generally speaking, why aren’t we all contributing more (code) to open source projects?
I have been using open source software for as long as I can remember doing programming work. Yet I’ve probably contributed no more than a few dozen lines to all projects together. And realizing this it’s easy to see that this is the case for 99.9% of the developers out there.
So why aren’t we contributing more to open source projects? What is stopping us? I’ll give you some probable causes and ideas how to improve it for your own open source project. Continue reading »
