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Comment by VortexDream | Hacker News Reader

Releasing a project as open source is associated with a lot of work and responsibility. People get quite entitled over open source projects and get quite upset when developers don't do what they want. I can see why he's unwilling to undergo all that stress and pressure if he feels it doesn't benefit him.

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He can do what I do with my own personal projects: if you install something I wrote, you get the source code whether you want it or not. Setup.exe basically dumps a copy of my development directory into the specified installation folder.

That way, if I get hit by a bus, it's fine, The Source Is Out There. If someone wants to send a bug fix or improvement, great, thanks, I'll be glad to take a look. Otherwise, don't bug me.

The idea that "open source" is necessarily a full-time maintenance job with formal processes and expectations is something somebody made up.

> if you install something I wrote, you get the source code whether you want it or not. Setup.exe basically dumps a copy of my development directory into the specified installation folder.

This is really cool, can you share a bit about how you do this? Are you using a makefile and putting a gzip as an embed into the setup? Is this a function of the installer you're using? Thanks for any insight.

Not a whole lot to it. I just add the makefile, .cpp and .h files, Windows resource script, and other sources to the .iss file that Inno Setup uses to generate the setup program. They all get dumped in the same directory at installation time, for better or worse.

In the case of one commercial application, there are also binary blobs in the form of DLLs that support custom hardware.

It's not one of those practices that scales particularly well, but it works for me...

Seems to me like the fact it doesn't scale is why you do it. It's a decent way to avoid the responsibilities of having to lead an open source project while still giving others the benefits of having the source code available and modifiable. I wish more devs would do this.

Or he could just do it FamiTracker style: make no mention of source code on the website/communications, include a zip named "SOURCE" on the normal download which contains the source code, license, and a simple text file with build instructions.

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