Originally Posted by
cruizrisner
REAL programmers SHARE code on purpose and wish others to use/edit/add to their code. most of the public coders here will never get anywhere in programming if all they do is complain of leechers.
First off plenty if not most "real programmers" don't share code as most of that code is proprietary and intellectual property of the company. Sharing that code would breach copyright laws.
Though there are opensource communities, they are usually non-profit. Also there are still leechers in business practice they aren't called leechers, but they are just as incompetant. For instance the makers of DivX leeched code from Windows Media Player, which caused it to experience incompatibility problems stopping WMP from working. So leeching isn't always good.
My stance? I believe in open source. I would be willing to share code as much as possible to the extent that I can still keep an edge in whatever business I'm in. However I share that code not so that others can simply overlook and copy what I did, but IMPROVE it or just learn understand it. It is important that programmers learn from an opensource community instead of just using the code without understanding the knowledge behind it. I would say that has primarily been the problem here.
Hack source have an added problem in that they play on exploits. We should be teaching people the skills needed to hack. leeching code does not produce a better hack. It has been seen over and over again that it creates a group of inept leechers that are very limited in their abilities outside of a specific game and the tools provided to them by other more skillful programmers. No new site is going to change this. We need to teach techniques, but people are only interested in creating hacks not improving the field as a whole.
I have witnessed various approaches and have seen that the best learning enviroment come from not stopping leeching entirely, but crediting those who provided the code, as well as knowledgeable people competing to advance techniques and seeking credit among others knowledgeable people. The one problem with these communities is they are against "pay-hacks" and tend to die off. So the most important part of a good learning community is to attract new members willing to learn and continue a tradition. That is why I stay here. It takes several years to gain enough skill to really start advancing the art, but the important part is creating an enviroment in which new people can join and there is reason for others to stay for long enough to advance the art themselves.
The unfortunate fact is that many people start going up the ladder and just drop off, at the same time I do not see these people reappear in other communities. This means that there is a disconnect between these communities. There is no smooth transition so those who seems like "hot stuff" here become overwhelmed and like-wise give up on their advancement.
There has yet to be a "pay-hack" community to do exceedingly well at gaining and retaining coders. However MPGH is good at retaining regular members, so I assume it should be possible to do the same with coders. It's just a matter of time. I think people should stay and simply try to improve the community, but I know people will want to create their own community. That may work for a little bit, but then they will want to attract members and will have to deal with the same problems MPGH deals with. I think its because of this sites peculiar position as being a gamehacking site, not focused on "payhacks" or purely learning, but rather community that it has a chance to excel when others can not. This why I will stay here until the coding community matures, and why I think others should do like-wise and try figuring out what they really want.
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