Devs have eaten the world

Something important changed between the 90s and today. If you look at most open source projects now, the distribution of who’s doing the work versus who’s simply there is skewed dramatically: it’s common to see projects where 95% of the work is done by a nucleus of people, perhaps even a single developer, with a long tail of “contributors” who are ... See more

And all this happened with surprisingly little at stake: in the case of open source the main incentive is just individual software engineers gaining prestige and high-paying jobs. Nadia Eghbal has written extensively about the incentive problems in the open source community holding back progress.