Hard choice. One other factor you didn't mention about is community. In releasing your code to a wider audience, you are trying to create a community around y

Hard choice. One other factor you didn't mention about is community. In releasing your code to a wider audience, you are trying to create a community around your code. Community requires support; a wiki/bug-tracker to post problems and solutions, a mailing-list to support conversations and questions, a robust source control server to host your code, and a understandable release process to push out new versions. Also, you will need to write a lot of documentation about your code, how to install, how to extend, etc. You will probably want to write a FAQ first to fend off first-time newbie questions about installation, management, etc. You will also have to make conscientious decisions about what versions your software will run on, and which requests you will support -- we run a stack on Tomcat 5.5 with Java 5, for example, but we have gotten X amount of questions about support for Java 6, JBoss, JRun, etc etc etc. My two cents: it's rough to get other people involved. The good karma for open-sourcing can be more trouble if you are not organized about how to handle and attract new members to your project.