It's not like they blatantly told people not to develop code for Steem...except when they did. Mostly they just didn't bother with documentation, and discouraged people from working on Steem, and instead work on projects for it, or whatever. The idea was that because it was so difficult, we should leave it up to them and just work on projects on top. Mostly it was a death of a thousand cuts. Open source development isn't easy. It needs the people behind a project, or someone else, to put together the resources to make it easier to jump in. Because Steemit was taking the front, no one stepped up to make those resources instead. Really, we should have.

Guess we have to make sure we do all that usual helpful open source crap for Hive.