> This is not my personal experience nor the experience of a number of folks that I know personally. I think it's pretty hard to generalize about this.

I think it’s pretty easy to generalise because public repositories are public, so the data is available.

The vast majority of repositories on GH has between 0 and 10 stars and no issues raised by other people.

Even people (like myself) who have repos with thousands of stars and other GH members “following” them, will have other repos with in GH with zero interaction.

> So what? It's probably not going to impact you, so it's okay and we just have to deal with it? I reject that logic entirely.

That’s a really uncharitable interpretation of my comment.

A more charitable way of reading it would be:

“Worrying about a minor problem that is easily remediated and likely wouldn’t happen anyway isn’t a strong reason to miss out.”

If we were talking about something high stakes, where one’s career, family or life would be affected; then I’d understand. But the worst outcome here is an assumption gets proven true and they delete the repo.

Please don’t take this as a persuasive argument that someone should do something they don’t want to do. If people don’t want to share their code then that’s their choice.

Instead this is responding to the comment that your friend DID want to share but was scared of a theoretical but low risk and unlikely scenario. That nervousness isn’t irrational, but it’s also not a good reason by itself to miss out on doing something you said they did want to do.

If however, that was really just an excuse and they actually had no real desire to share their code, then they should just be honest and say that. There’s no obligation that people need to open source their pet projects so they don’t need to justify it with arguments about GHs lack controls. They can just said “I don’t want my code public” and that’s a good enough reason itself.