TL;DR: Open Source is a infinite-length can of worms. Are there any plans on opening it?
Not much more to say apart from the title. I can imagine some tradeoffs.
Cons
Source code may be important to keep proprietary/hidden for money/licensing reasons.
Managing a public repository is an additional moderation exercise with significant management overhead.
Source code may not even be easily uploaded to common open-source hosting services.
Public source code hastens the process of security vulnerability discoveries in the service.
External contributions can easily become bikeshedded wazones with multiple external contributors.
Pointless
code criticism can often be wielded as general service criticism (i.e.
"look at this specific technical decision: i think it's foolish
therefore the entire service is garbage").
Pressure to merge
public PR's might conflict with internal development directions, which
might look messy on the surface if PR merges stall out.
ASSC may be ideologically opposed to allowing/supporting labor without compensation.
Pros
Niche
features that might be on the roadmap but deprioritized due to
scheduling can be contributed up by weird nerds that really want the
feature.
Boring nerds that enjoy writing nice documentation may even make internal development easier? (okay this one is a stretch).
At least one random person (me) can satisfy their curiosity.
I would imagine an ideal world for me would be a public (or maybe invite-only to slow down spam issues) github org with a couple repos of various cohost components (i.e. client, server software). More pragmatically I could imagine a read-only mirror of an internal repo, updated adhoc.
I
really enjoyed reading ASSC's manifesto, so I'd like the lend a hand if appropriate to see the club succeed. At a glance I very much understand if the answer is "No we won't open source Cohost" given the tradeoffs & the work involved (that would be my answer too if I were in your position), but I figured I'd ask in case the answer surprises me.
lukekaalim@gmail.com
Cons
I really enjoyed reading ASSC's manifesto, so I'd like the lend a hand if appropriate to see the club succeed. At a glance I very much understand if the answer is "No we won't open source Cohost" given the tradeoffs & the work involved (that would be my answer too if I were in your position), but I figured I'd ask in case the answer surprises me.
Thanks for reading!