[static_typed]

Sure - when restaurants take on a new cook or chef, they may well ask him to produce a dish or two, but none of those dishes will be sold to paying customers outside. The staff/management will check them, try them, review them, but will not be selling them to the customers outside.

[ctdonath]

Undiscussed: the paying customers would understandably be outraged to discover live code which they paid for was created by non-employees operating without pay under adverse conditions. You want to work for a company that would do that to their customers?

ETA: I'm referring to product integrity. Do you want a highly complex and specialized product developed, at least in part, by people whose total exposure & involvement lasted less than a day and had basically no incentive to do it right?

[lemonberry]

Is this sarcasm? I don't think most people care about the conditions workers have to work in. This a problem that bridges many industries from chocolate to diamonds to electronic products to clothing.

[RogerL]

But why do we care? In your specific example (which I do recognize as being proffered as an analogy not an equality), I'd rather the food went to a hungry person than picked at then dumped in the trash. Of course it can't work that way because after all they need to taste your food to evaluate it.

All I'm saying is I wouldn't care if my work ended up in their code base vs an open source code base, and I'd prefer it to just being wiped from the hard drive after I was done. In return I'd get something very valuable - insight into the working conditions, what it is like to work with the senior dev, what the code base looks like, what the build and QA system is like, and so on.