If I write something useful, I'm willing to share it with people when I can. It makes me happy knowing I contributed something that might make the world a smidge better.

That doesn't mean I'm willing to accept your patch. As soon as I accept collaboration, I need to worry about copyright on the contributions, whether they follow my coding style, and whether I'm willing to accept additional complexity for features I don't care about.

> Why? I mean, if you're that hostile to collaboration, why not just keep it closed source and maybe try to charge for it?

- There exist open source licenses (with copyleft) that disallow making it closed source.

- There exist other reasons to publish the source code: for example allowing the user to study it.

Python is my language of choice, so posting projects means publishing the source code.

> Python is my language of choice, so posting projects means publishing the source code.

Technically you could just post the .pyc bytecode as long as you didn't care about it working on anything but CPython and compatible implementations.

This might make it a bit harder for someone but wouldn't really stop people from reverse engineering it.