Quote: Originally Posted by mobileh1
All I was suggesting was that open sourceing a project isnt always in the authors best interest.
True. However it is in the community as a whole's best interest. And the key is to remember that
open source doesn't necessarily mean free(as in beer). Open source just means that the source code comes with the program, it allows users to tweak the program to suit their individual needs and takes the stress of fixing bugs and spreads it among the entire community of programers who use the program.
Quote: Originally Posted by mobileh1
you could go after Frodo and claim you 'owned' part of that product
As to the intellectual property issue of who owns contributed code, just put a clause saying any "officially contributed code" becomes the property of
insert software company here. Any nonofficial code stays just that, unofficial third party snippets that the end user can decide to use or not. If the main designer wanted to give incentives to work on his project he could offer profit sharing to particularly helpful contributors. If people don't want to contibute their code for free, its not like they're being forced to write it, then their code doesn't make it into the next release and someone else will eventually write it.