Open Source Or Private?

There have been many questions from the community all over the web, about whether or not they should make their projects open source or private. In my opinion, I like open source better, but that may not be your opinion after you read this article. There are many different reasons about why you should make your project open source or if you should make your project private.

Open Source

There are a lot of reasons why you could want to make your project open source. One main reason is contributions from the community. The outside community can make contributions to your project to help improve it and to help you learn a little more about the field in which you are experimenting with. Another reason is that the community can inform you about issues in your project that you did not catch. One of the main ways to make your project open source is to put it on a hosting site. One of these, Github , is one of the most used, open source hosting websites today, and over 19 million developers use it. Github is probably the way to go with open source. The real main reason that you would put your project out to the community a open source is that the community would help you or give you feedback on your project.

Private

There are many reasons that you might want to make your project private too. One of the main, main reasons is that you don’t want your project to be pirated. If you sell software for a lot of money, a lot of criminals might want that money too. They would see that your project is open source, copy the code, and sell it for a cheaper amount at a faster rate behind your back, all the while, making you loose money. So, if you don’t want to loose your money because of a pirate taking your booty, go ahead and make your project private. There are many ways that you can make your project private. Github offers a $7 a month private repository network, and Bitbucket offers a free private repository network. I mainly use Bitbucket for private repositories because it is free, except that the only down side is, Bitbucket does not host websites, but Github does.

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