Fear of the FOSS

We - the open source zealots - talk a lot about corporations with unkind interests quash the movement, pushing their proprietary code, and violating everyone's 'privacy'. We don't talk much about how scary people find working in the open.

We can say to engineers, 'your users will be better served, with better security, if you develop in the open, so maybe you should recommend that at your company'.

1. Greater transparency shows errors.
2. With enough eyes on the code, all bugs become shallow.

We don't think much about what they hear:

1. A thousand pairs of eyes will look, with judgement, on the code you wrote.
2. Every pair of eyes belong to someone who cares about code quality enough to look, and judge, and have opinions.
3. The thousand pairs of judgemental eyes will dissect your code, and your thoughts, exposing every mistake, and they will note your name.

It's scary business!

It's much less scary once you get used to it. Less scary if you're doing something as a hobby, 'just for fun', and do not need to justify the quality of the work. Less scary than if you feel certain your habits meet best practice, and you enjoy arguing your case.

'Personally, I love open source software, and never feared putting my dot-files on Github', I tell people happily, while they think about the kinds of user-policy scripts their company relies on, and how many client-names appear in their actual code because it was just easier that way. They nod their head half-heartedly, they admit it 'works for some places', and remember the time they broke the database by removing old employees, and then just decided to hang onto the data forever rather than rewrite the scripts from scratch.

'Academia', I have often said 'would benefit so much from the open-source model'. People could share their ideas for a study before the study, we could follow their progress, and see which R functions they use on their data (which would also be open to anyone to download).

We don't think about the other side. We think of marvellous teamwork, and useful pointers, but never consider the embarrassing ways academics undoubtedly use all of their statistics tools until a colleague points out the blunder one hour before the deadline.

We don't think about the privacy that engineers who work on closed-source software enjoy, and many of us open-source zealots may not feel comfortable on the other side of the fence, making a push to violate someone else's feeling of privacy by constantly asking to open the curtains on their embarrassing mess.