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Comment by HidyBush | Hacker News Reader

>the benefits of writing it have to be elsewhere. In the satisfaction of a job done well. In the beauty and elegance of the code. The timeless perfection.

or, more realistically and less rose tintedly, people want to implement a functionality for their personal use case and hack together some code and libraries to get it done as quickly as possible

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Then what would be the point in publishing it? Open source isn't just copying files to GitHub. If you aren't putting yourself out there and helping others understand how they might benefit from your work, then it's like a tree falling in the forest. Evangelizing is probably the bulk of the effort. So who would risk embarrassing themselves by evangelizing a giant hairball they slapped together? Any open source of note, you can always count on the fact that someone poured their heart and soul into it, at some point in the project's lifecycle.

Uhm, I've worked on both free software projects that were "a giant hairball" and on nicely structured things to be proud of.

Whoever has ever done something knows that you can help someone more with a messy project that does something than a near-perfect codebase that does nothing of value. And you publish something to help someone else!

A personal project can be done to achieve something or to aim for that illusive perfection we can never achieve at work (or both, ofc: it's not a XOR). Neither is to be discounted!

Yes but without vision, elegance, and leadership, open source is just a dumpster for corporations. Sure dumps are very helpful. But it's still a dump. There's no reason why it has to be that way. For example, something like Goodwill that's helpful and pleasant at the same time.

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