What are the disadvantages of opening the source of your own science tools

Question

I am currently finishing my PhD thesis and, as a great deal of the job was to create tools and protocoles, I am considering putting the different scripts I wrote on open source directories (such as SourceForge or GitHub).

The advantage I see for opening them is:

1. They will be available for everyone and can be reused by the scientific community
2. They could be improved (and corrected) by others
3. It ensure my authorship for the different scripts (I can prove I put them there)

However, I was wondering if there is any drawback of doing so (for future publication, version maintenance, and so on).

I have to precise that not all the work was published yet. My field is biological science.

Answer 1

Some disadvantages could be:

• People may expect you to maintain the code. If you don't maintain it, the code may be rendered useless at some point.
• You might feel forced to document the code. This is actually an advantage, but many people would not realise that ;)
• You might have to work on cleaning up the code. Exactly the same point as above applies, if you ever want to re-use your code this is actually an advantage.
• If people start using your code (this is not impossible), they could e-mail you and start asking questions. This takes your time. On the other hand, it also provides you the opportunity to be co-author (so hey! don't document, so people are forced to ask your help ;-)

More points are raised in the very similar question that was asked at Programmers.SE less than a month ago:

Why don't research papers that mention custom software release the source code?

Answer 2

Here are some objections I've heard. It's up to you to decide how relevant it is to you. This post isn't to say that I endorse all or any of them: it's just to list some of the potential disadvantages.

You might be giving away your most promising source of future funding: the exploiting and extending of those tools and protocols.

The tools and protocols are potentially your future career. You've put an awful lot of work into them. Only now, can you start getting value out of them. Giving them away, means giving away all your hard work, for others to leap ahead of you, and free-load off your development work.

You will get the aggro of users demanding more documentation, and the constant nagging of questions. And because they got the tools and protocols for free, their expectations may be even higher, and they'll feel even more entitled to more of your time, than if they'd paid for it.

Weird, I know, but from experience, many users have lower expectations of paid tools than of free tools, because with paid tools, there are well-defined boundaries of what the user gets for their money. As learnt from experience, and from behavioural economics experiments, people tend to value something more, if they've paid for it.