Possible benefits from starting an open source project include name recognition, social status in the hacker tribe, a portfolio to show prospective employers, m

Possible benefits from starting an open source project include name recognition, social status in the hacker tribe, a portfolio to show prospective employers, meeting other hackers, more competition for software companies, and the moral benefits of giving away useful tools to others. If you're not committed to it and don't want the trouble of managing a mailing list and dealing with feature requests, you can still open-source it and wait for someone else fork it. Keeping your software secret is good for practice and competitive advantage. It's a good strategy if you don't need much help from others and you're working on something difficult and non-obvious that could be useful in a future startup. But good problems like this are rare, so I suspect open-sourcing is the better choice for most projects.