Snellman: On open sourcing existing code

Juho Snellman has an interesting treatise on the oft-overlooked challenges that face developers attempting to release an existing, proprietary codebase under open-source terms. "As soon as you get outside of the "one self-contained file or directory" level of complexity, the threshold for releasing code becomes much higher. And likewise every change to a program that was made in order to open source it will make it less likely that the two versions can really be kept in sync in the long term. In this case the core code is maybe 2k-3k lines and won't require much work. It's all the support infrastructure that's going to be an issue." Snellman also reflects on possible strategies for writing internal code that may some day be released to the public.