Even for code I didn't publish (like corporate SDK internals), I have been contacted (which took some work, because my employer did not like customers interacting with Engineering), and told (not "asked" -told) to make changes to our corporate, closed-source SDK to suit some rando's tinkering around (also, for extra credit, said rando hadn't even purchased one of our cameras).

Even open-sourcing has its caveats.

Anyone that has spent any time at all, on most tech forums, have seen the "Open Source Holy Wars" being fought.

I tend to use the MIT license. I won't go into the reasons why. I write OSS, and I support it. I choose to do so under MIT.

In the past, I have been contacted (I make it easy to get in touch with me), and told that I was a "corporate shill" for not using GPL.

That's always a great way to start the day.

Also, our corporation had to fend off a few legal threats, because some of our software looked vaguely like some GPL stuff (I guarantee it wasn't -they were anal about the GPL), so zealots would sometimes throw sueballs (or vague threats, thereof) at us.

At least the patent trolls would do a little bit of homework before attacking us. These folks wouldn't even bother wondering if they might be mistaken before unleashing the hounds.

However, what about just releasing a zip file with the sources and linking it on your downloads page?

But the ones that have at least rudimentary documenation, something a new maintainer has something to work with - those are the few ones, that might be picked up by some community. Rare, yes - because there is not much fun in writing documentation on your personal pet project in your free time. But it might be still worth it.