OSDev.org

So what do you think about it?

With "discussing ideas", I mean from posting insightful threads in forums like this to making available part or full source code of one's projects.

What do you think? Are you never concerned about third parties using it at their advantage without you ever knowing that they are using some of those bright ideas, specially assuming that at some point it could diminish or even void your chances to earn money/improve it freely without others distorting it to patent it, among other possible situations?

Even if it's under an open source license like GNU, it doesn't mean that others sooner or later won't use it to make their own products, in the worst case taking full credit for it and earning all one could imagine in place of the original author, "I".

So then, how bearable could that be?

I code my OS for a hobby, and also as a showcase for potential employers. *If I can help it* I will try and stop code theft (such as putting my entire source tree in an anonymous FTP directory - see The OS Development forum subsection), but am prepared for the fact that I can't stop theft unless I go closed source. Which I don't want to do.

I'm not particularly concerned about this.

I'm not in the IT profession and I'm never going to earn any money from my coding - chances are that if anyone uses my code for their own commercial purposes:

a) I'll probably never know about it and
b) It'll crash and burn anyway.

Cheers,
Adam

The other way around here: I have a job in the IT industry, what I do here is simply a hobby. If someone would take ideas or code, that won't cost me a cent, and perhaps I even get to see better products because of it which I couldn't ever complete myself.