joeware - never stop exploring... :)

I get a lot of questions regarding the availability of source code for my joeware utilities. I am not sure why, I thought I have been pretty clear on the web pages for the tools:

Source Code Availability

          None

I think that is clear. I tried to keep it simple and concise. Despite this clarity I get at least 3-4 emails a week asking for source code. On some special days, like the last two, I get flooded with 10+ requests in a day. It is like people think, “Well he means it isn’t available to anyone but me…” No I mean you too. Seriously. No.

I especially like it when say one out of every five or so will then tell me about, or worse, lecture me about Open/Shared Source and how it is such a great thing and how I should embrace it and blah blah blah blah. I had no less than four email conversations with four different people this week all telling me that after I said no. Like I haven’t heard of open source I guess… One guy was so so ok with how he presented it but the other three were outright annoying and whiney. To all of them I finally asked, well hey, if this Shared Projects / Open Source is so great, how about you point me to some of the projects you have personally contributed to so I can check out how much value you add to the whole thing? Guess how many responses I got back? Well I will tell you that will be the first thing I say now to anyone asking for my source code. Not that that will change anything, the guys who write WireShark could ask for joeware source and even though I like WireShark and I think they do a great job, I am still not sharing the source code. Their decision to share their source has no bearing on my decision to not share it.

Why not you ask? Because I found it to be a painful thing to do and quite frankly, I don’t see a reason to supply the leeches and companies with shitty coders with my code. I did it a long time ago and received emails for years when idiots with compilers who thought they were programmers (versus just idiots with compilers) tried to modify the code to do other things and broke it – including people who turned my freely available source into programs they sold to others. They would ask me why the program didn’t work in a certain case without telling me they had modified it and I would do free troubleshooting for them. Not one single good thing came to me for publishing source code openly for others but I did feel pain and received considerable nastiness when I refused to help so you can imagine how often I will do it in the future.

   joe