Free Software Syndrome
While thinking about the discussion that my recent series of posts about the career benefits of contributing to the open source community, I started wondering about whether this could actually have some effect on how software gets designed. We’ve all heard of “Not Invented Here Syndrome,” where developers decide to reimplement something, even when the technically better way to go would be to reuse some existing code.
I think there is also a small but growing tendency towards a “Free Software Syndrome,” where developers push management to release something as open source, not necessarily to get the benefits of community testing and review, more developers, or anything like that, but simply so that the developers can be open source developers.