Hey @pouriap and thanks for a great question.
@ComputerWhiz and @juraj.masiar already provided great answers and I want to share another point.
Yes, it’s true that there’s a chance that everything that is put out into the world, could be copied by somebody. There are some legal protections like copyright and trademark available to protect your work but it’s also a lot of extra work (and sometimes money, especially in case of trademarking) from the developer. And even then, someone could copy the idea and there’s nothing really protecting against that.
As an open source developer myself, I don’t worry about others copying or making changes to what I build – I actually encourage that through publishing with open source licensing because personally I believe that it’s better for the world if people build on top of each other’s ideas.
If we’re talking about credit for work (as in, social stuff and recognition), if you publish something as open source, you can always use that as a prove that you created it before someone else did.
The big reason why I think the risk is worth taking almost 100% of the time is that if you don’t put your work out there, you’ll miss out on a lot of feedback that helps you make the product better. If someone copies your original work, you’re still the one who knows more about your project and has the motivation and passion to build it forward and that’s momentum that is hard to keep up if just copying.
Building something in the open, sharing it with the world and getting those strangers to be your first users and testers is a great way to build connections and learn from actual users who want to use (and maybe even in the future, contribute to it) your extension.
