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... See more

I’d speculate that another factor is the half-life of cool new productivity software. Evernote, Slack, Notion, Roam, Craft, and many others seem to get pretty far on community excitement for their first few years. After that, I think you have to be left with software that serves a deep and hard-to-replace purpose in people’s lives. Muse got there... See more

It recently occurred to me that the really obvious comparison for what’s going on here is the open source software community back in the 90s. Eric S Raymond’s essay Homesteading the Noosphere, a reference text on the social norms and incentive structure of the free software movement, explains exactly what’s going on. We’re no longer dealing with a... See more