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

Historically, most of our questions about the value of content have focused on the distribution side, rather than the production side. Today, the most interesting questions we can ask will focus on how content is made and maintained, and by whom. We’ve previously treated content as a first-copy cost problem, and have developed solutions like patent... See more

Refactoring is the process by which developers pay down technical debt: rewriting, simplifying, and otherwise cleaning up the codebase without changing its functionality. Much like editing a book versus writing it for the first time, refactoring code is often dreaded and unrewarding work. Since open source developers tend toward work that they find... See more

Contributors – make contributions to a project’s repositories, ranging from casual to significant, but who aren’t responsible for its overall success

To borrow again from conservation biologoy, maintainers can be thought of as keystone species. A keystone species is small in population size but has an outsize impact on its ecosystem. If we were to imagine a forest, for example, while there may not be many wolves in absolute numbers, if the wolves disappeared there would be cascading effects on t... See more

Like a talent agency, platforms add value to creators by first improving their distribution, exposing them to potentially millions of people. The discovery benefit primarily aids creators who are still building an audience. This feedback loop is positive-sum, encouraging more creators to join. So long as more people keep using the platform, there’s... See more

Like any other creator, these developers create work that is intertwined with, and influenced by, their users, but it’s not collaborative in the way that we typically think of online communities

It’s not the excessive consumption of code but he excessive participation from users vying for a maintainer’s attention that has made the work untenable for maintenance today