I tend to share a good proportion of the code that I write to enhance my own use of Omni apps like OmniFocus, and I often benefit from others finding bugs and suggesting enhancements.

In short, my willingness to share is based on an assumption of reciprocity. I give and gain, and generally hope that the store of public goods on the Omni site will thereby increase. I'm beginning, however, to wonder whether that assumption is correct, and whether I should really continue to share in this way.

It seems that enthusiastic consumers of shared code on this site are not always quite so enthusiastic about feeding their bug finds and fixes back into the public good of the Omni forum.

I recently received a private message on this forum along the general lines of:

"I thought I'd take a quick look at why your code wasn't working for someone, and with a few tweaks, it seems to be working now.

Would it be okay with you if, once I'm done playing around with it a bit more, I placed it on my site (With proper attribution and links to you, of course)."

Well that's perfectly fine, but even in a subsequent (private) exchange I was surprised to notice that there was no offer at all of any detail as to what the bugs or fixes really were ...

Was the Paypal button on the site in question a clue to that lack of spontaneous reciprocity ? Enthusiasm for taking shared code, but less enthusiasm for feeding bugs and fixes back to the site where it came from ? A preference for diverting traffic elsewhere, towards what would now be the canonical and properly functioning version ?

So I had a quick look at my code again, tested its output with the receiving apps, and found within two minutes that the edits required boiled down to just two bytes - the removal of a linefeed, and the addition of a space.

My assumption was that anyone who spotted that kind of thing would feed it back to this site, so that users of this forum could benefit.

The real preference appears, however, to have been to fork away from free discussion and exchange of code on the Omni forum towards a site which sports a coy but still noticeable ('feel free to contribute') PayPal button (leaving the functionality and reputation of the original code looking a bit neglected :-)

Well, understandable, I guess, but it's not the spirit in which I have personally been sharing code, and it undermines the assumptions on which that sharing has rested.

Time for me to reflect ?

Any thoughts ?

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