why i open-source things

I don’t open-source my code because I think it’s particularly good. I open-source it because a poem that’s never read is just a diary entry, and code is the closest thing I have to a public voice.

The first time someone filed an issue on a tool I’d written, I felt the way I imagine a poet feels when a stranger quotes a line back to them. Someone had read it. Not skimmed — read. They’d found the edge case I’d left unhandled, the comment I’d written to my future self, the one place where the abstraction leaked.

The gift economy

Open source runs on the same logic as live music: you can’t copy the feeling of a song, but you can give it away and still have it. Code given away comes back as issues, pull requests, forks — each one a kind of conversation. The 1975 played their early demos on SoundCloud for free. Nobody accused them of devaluing their work.

What I release

Small things, mostly. Tools that do one thing well, documented in plain English, licensed permissively. I’d rather release a haiku a month than a saga every three years. The garden grows one pixel at a time.

If you’re reading this and you’ve ever considered open-sourcing something — a script, a theme, a single useful function — do it. The internet is full of code that’s trying to be impressive. What it’s short on is code that’s trying to be useful.