Each one that I publish is a Responsibility. Like a parent that has children, the package is no longer “completely mine.” All changes and fixes are made, keeping in mind that someone may be dependent upon my work.
I’ve been writing SDKs -literally- my entire career (I can link to my very first engineering project, in 1987, where I designed a hardware system, and a companion SDK).
A perfectly legitimate reason for keeping code private, is that I am not willing to support it for any use, other than my own personal use.
Even for code I didn't publish (like corporate SDK internals), I have been contacted (which took some work, because my employer did not like customers interacting with Engineering), and told (not "asked" -told) to make changes to our corporate, closed-source SDK to suit some rando's tinkering around (also, for extra credit, said rando hadn't even purchased one of our cameras).
Even open-sourcing has its caveats.
Anyone that has spent any time at all, on most tech forums, have seen the "Open Source Holy Wars" being fought.
I tend to use the MIT license. I won't go into the reasons why. I write OSS, and I support it. I choose to do so under MIT.
In the past, I have been contacted (I make it easy to get in touch with me), and told that I was a "corporate shill" for not using GPL.
That's always a great way to start the day.
Also, our corporation had to fend off a few legal threats, because some of our software looked vaguely like some GPL stuff (I guarantee it wasn't -they were anal about the GPL), so zealots would sometimes throw sueballs (or vague threats, thereof) at us.
At least the patent trolls would do a little bit of homework before attacking us. These folks wouldn't even bother wondering if they might be mistaken before unleashing the hounds.
However, what about just releasing a zip file with the sources and linking it on your downloads page?
This almost never happen, even when the interest is very high... I love open source and free software, but we should face that this point is more a fantasy than a real thing.
But the ones that have at least rudimentary documenation, something a new maintainer has something to work with - those are the few ones, that might be picked up by some community. Rare, yes - because there is not much fun in writing documentation on your personal pet project in your free time. But it might be still worth it.
