Making is Show Business now

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

Eghbal writes: “The default hypothesis today is that, faced with growing demand, an open source “maintainer” - the term used to refer to the primary developer, or developers, of a software project - needs to find more contributors. It’s commonly thought that open source software is built by communities, which means that anyone can pitch in, thus di... See more

As Eghbal notes: “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.

The widespread perception of open source is that it’s community work. Looking back at the first heyday of open source in the 90s, you picture these loosely organized, squabbling, collaborative efforts between a closely-knit group of nerds. Some special technology, notably Linux, emerged from that era as evidence that self-motivated teams of volunte... See more

The hardest thing to do is to create, and then keep creating. The people who make the greatest impact are the people who can keep creating, one thing after another, growing in impact each time. If you look at the world’s great makers - Elon Musk, Beyoncé, whoever you like - they don’t stand apart because of their raw talent. They stand apart becaus... See more

But in this new world, making is show business. Look at what founders do all day! And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. It’s hard work to create a product, create attention, and then - most importantly - manage that attention so it feeds you momentum but doesn’t burn you out. That’s the hard part of show business; the part they don’t tell you ... See more

When a new member joined a community, they were probably serious about it. There weren’t many “tourists” back then, so there was a real environment of camaraderie.

Since community members joined slowly and stuck around, there was a lot of trust and shared context in the group. Every community had a different way of working, so there was a fair amount of friction preventing users from jumping around or “surfing” from project to project.

Here’s where we get to the real insight of the book, which isn’t actually an insight about software. It’s an insight about the relationship between creators and platforms.

Working in Public opens by challenging a common perception about open source today: the idea that it’s collaborative.