The scary thing about giving away your code is certainly this: You put in months, maybe years of development and now a competitor of yours just grabs your code,

The scary thing about giving away your code is certainly this: You put in months, maybe years of development and now a competitor of yours just grabs your code, puts in slight modifications and starts to sell. You, as you don't have the money, cannot file a lawsuit (if your competitor would be google or M$ for example). But: being into software development for more than 25 years now, I can honestly say: if a piece of code is longer than 300 lines, it is easier and faster to rewrite it yourself instead of trying to understand and modify someone elses code. That said: generally I would not say its bad to open source your code. On the other hand, if you really have something in it that nobody else has and that makes your app better than others, keep THAT part for yourself, at least for a while. See Apple. Aqua is closed, darwin is open. Good example, IMHO.