Why are programmers willing to open source their work on GitHub?

From its official launch on April 10, 2008 to today, GitHub has completed its first decade and officially entered the next decade. Chris DiBona (Google's open source code manager) believes that "the essence of Git is to allow everyone's contributions to merge seamlessly. The genius of GitHub lies in understanding the essence of Git." Here is a down-to-earth saying for us programmers: Sharing is a joy!

Putting aside the topic of "whether closed-source code can make a lot of money", let's directly summarize the main reasons why programmers are willing to make their source code public on GitHub:

1. Improve your visibility through code display

Let's start with a world-famous case. There is a very famous company called 37signals. It is a very small company with few employees, but it is very famous in the industry. Its fame is largely due to an opportunity: David Heinemeier Hansson, an employee, wrote a groundbreaking web rapid development framework in Ruby at work - Ruby on Rails. Its revolutionary design concept greatly improved the development efficiency of WEB websites. 37signals chose to release this project as open source, which caused a sensation in the industry.

As Ruby on Rails quickly became popular, 37signals, the birthplace of ROR, also came into the public eye and was named one of the top ten most noteworthy startups by Wired in 2008. Subsequently, several of the company's products achieved very good sales performance. In the best-selling book "Rework" published by 37signals, there is a passage like this: Most chefs are happy to teach their cooking skills on public channels, which not only does not harm the chef's commercial interests, but also greatly increases the chef's popularity. This is a great move for the chef.

We are in an industry where technology is being updated and iterated at an increasingly rapid pace. The most frightening thing is not the leakage of your superb technology, but that not enough people understand you through your technology. You have to compete in both technology and popularity to achieve a double-edged sword.

At present, GitHub is not just a simple code repository, but also a social platform and a stage for programmers to show off their skills. Showing their own code on this platform can help programmers increase their popularity in the industry circle more quickly. Of course, if you are lucky enough like David Heinemeier Hansson, you can also create your own legend in the industry.

2. Show your work and get good job opportunities

Showing your work is one of the best ways to get excellent job opportunities, especially in the programmer industry where "Talk is cheap, show me the code!"

GitHub provides a very convenient platform for both programmers and businesses.

As an employer, you can use this platform to understand the work of applicants, evaluate their technical strength, and determine whether they meet the company's requirements. This practice of using a programmer's performance on GitHub as a talent evaluation standard is becoming more and more common in programmer interviews.

As a programmer, the number of followers, stars, forks, and other data on GitHub can, to a certain extent, prove whether your programming skills are excellent and whether your technical ideas are understood and agreed upon by more people. The more popular a programmer is on GitHub, the more likely he or she will be favored by excellent employers.

Therefore, this phenomenon has further encouraged programmers to work hard to showcase themselves on GitHub, making the open source atmosphere even more intense.

3. Open source code benefits both you and others

Adobe released the source code of Photoshop 1.0. These codes are no longer of much value to Adobe, so it is better to make them public for other programmers to view and learn from, and at the same time bring some news and attention to themselves; Linus, the father of Linux, opened the Linux kernel to the public for a very "selfish" purpose - to have a free operating system suitable for his own use, so that interested people all over the world can maintain Linux together.

In the process of learning programming, solving bugs, and exchanging experiences, all programmers will inevitably use the fruits of others' labor, and at the same time help others solve problems, which forms an ecosystem that benefits both themselves and others. In this ecosystem, all programmers do not need to reinvent the wheel. Everyone contributes in an open source sharing atmosphere, enjoys all the output results while contributing, and constantly recreates while enjoying the results, thus forming a virtuous cycle of self-benefit and other-benefit ecosystem, and everyone can benefit from this ecosystem.

4. Make friends in the industry while practicing your skills

As we said before, GitHub can be a social platform and a stage for programmers to show off their skills. Here, there will be many technical experts. Maybe it is difficult to have the opportunity to contact them at ordinary times, but through the GitHub platform, your work will be likely to receive comments and suggestions from technical experts, helping you to quickly improve your skills; at the same time, you can also communicate with other programmers about professional issues such as bug solving experience and demand realization, thereby establishing connections and building a social circle for programmers.

In the world of programmers, showing off is simple and crude. Whenever they write a program that they think is great, they urgently need a channel to show their talents. Blogs and forums can become their positions, and open source forums such as Github have gradually become the main battlefield. In the eyes of programmers, only excellent and complete codes have souls, and people who don't understand programs are Muggles. This may be an important reason why GitHub is so successful. For programmer geeks, code can resonate with each other more than words.

5. You can make some money if you want

I'm just kidding. Although we programmers don't lack money (correct pronunciation: qian er), it's never a bad thing to get money. If it's a very good open source project, it can attract quite a lot of traffic on GitHub, and it's accurate traffic related to the project, so you know, some proper advertising can bring in some extra income.

Therefore, showing your work on GitHub is already a standard operation for excellent programmers, which may bring many more important things than making money. Of course, few people will show the most core and critical technologies and secrets related to project development on GitHub.