Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

One study found that, in a sample of 275 popular GitHub projects across various programming languages, nearly half of all contributors only contributed once. These contributors accounted for less than 2% of total commits, or overall contributions.

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less than 5% of developers were responsible for over 95% of code and social interactions.

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But just as tweets are easy to read and retweet without context as to who wrote them, code is easy to copy-paste without knowing, or caring, where it came from.

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The role of a maintainer is evolving. Rather than coordinating with a group of developers, these maintainers are defined by the need for curation: sifting through the noise of interactions, such as user questions, bug reports, and feature requests, which compete for their attention.

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Like other creators, open source developers make things for general public consumption. They, too, need to deal with crowded inboxes, manage their limited attention, and lean upon enthusiastic fans for support.

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Creators now reach a much bigger potential audience, but these relationships are fleeting, one-sided, and often overwhelming.

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From an economic perspective, code is similar to other forms of content.

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but if an open source project goes down, it can literally break the internet

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As a case study, open source helps us understand why our online world didn’t evolve the way that early scholars predicted, as well as how our economy might reorient itself around individual creators and the platforms upon which they build.

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But Git, the most popular version control system today, was only released in 2005.

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“Free as in freedom, not free as in beer,”

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According to Levy’s portrait, hackers care about improving the world, but don’t believe in following the rules to get there.

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“The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary,”

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Coding became like tweeting in more ways than one.

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As a result, the idea of what might constitute an “open source project” became smaller, too, not unlike the shift from blog posts to tweets.

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It’s unsurprising, then, that these emerging behaviors would become among the defining characteristics of JavaScript, a language ecosystem that grew up on GitHub.

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In the mid-2000s, developers started finding creative ways to use JavaScript on the backend of their applications

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JavaScript’s universal appeal makes it both extremely accessible and extremely powerful. As such, from a cultural perspective, it has made strange bedfellows out of frontend and backend developers. Contemporary JavaScript grew up in the post-Web 2.0 era. It’s friendly and polished, but also politically charged. It attracts developers who like to explain things, and explain them with emoji and brightly colored logos.

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As a result, each project tends to be smaller and more disposable, like LEGO blocks that fit together instead of a castle carved from stone.

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JavaScript developers aren’t always known for a specific project anymore, either, the way Stallman is known for GNU, or Torvalds is known for Git and Linux. Rather than being associated with just one project, or a few, prominent JavaScript developers often create hundreds of small yet widely used projects. They’re known for who they are, rather than which projects they’re involved in.

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Benkler is careful to emphasize that he does not think that commons-based peer production is always preferable to the firm, but rather yet another possible outcome:

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A few of the conditions that Benkler identifies as necessary to pull off commons-based peer production are intrinsic motivation, modular and granular tasks, and low coordination costs.

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In the case of open source, it’s assumed that developers participate because they enjoy writing code.

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And Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel and operating system as “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional,”114 then released the version control system Git as “some scripts to try to track things a whole lot faster.”

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Can the management of open source projects accommodate the increasing number of contributors? The frequency and quality of contributions to each of the open source projects studied appears to be highly skewed, with a few individuals (or at most a few dozen) accounting for a disproportionate amount of the contributions, with most programmers making just one or two submissions.

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While some like to grumble at GitHub’s homogenizing effects, what happened in open source isn’t much different from what happened to the rest of the internet.

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Before platforms, our online world was a scattered collection of forums, blogs, personal websites. People might have felt an affinity to, say, a particular message board, but they had little sense of who else was out there, and they largely stayed out of one another’s way.

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“Eternal September”

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Deferring to one’s community seems to be more obviously aligned with democratic values, but open source’s distributed nature makes that ideal challenging to live up to. If maintainers were to defer to their community, how could they assess overall opinion, given the lack of clear membership boundaries? Countries have citizenships and constituencies, but open source projects are open to anyone. If someone made a one-time contribution to Opal, does that make them a “contributor” in the same sense as a lead maintainer? How do we know if the developers opposing or favoring action represent a minority voice, if we don’t know the actual population of the community?

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“Rough consensus is achieved when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated.”

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Rather, I suspect we’ve converged upon commits partly because they’re comparatively easy to measure, and partly because we do need a way to talk about a particular subset of the open source workflow—issues, pull requests, code review—as opposed to, say, publishing blog posts or event planning.

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Streamlabs, which provides tools for livestreamers, including a tipping functionality, reported $34.7 million in tips paid out to Twitch streamers in the first quarter of 2018.317

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While these aren’t bad outcomes by any means, if “get hired somewhere” were treated as the upper bound of what’s possible, today’s world of online creators would be much less interesting. Why should open source be any different?

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One hypothesis is that “open source” is quickly becoming indistinguishable from “doing code stuff in public.”

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Overall, I’d expect to see in the news industry something similar to what happened in open source: a “dumbbell”-shaped distribution of contributors.

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Transitions are hard, but when it comes to making money as a creator online, I feel more optimistic about these opportunities than ever. We’re moving toward a future where rewards are heavily influenced by the quality of one’s audience more than its size. This affords creators an enormous degree of freedom and helps perpetuate the renaissance of ideas that is already well underway.

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