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

Given limited time and attention, solo maintainers need to balance reactive tasks (community interactions) with proactive ones (writing code).

02: THE STRUCTURE OF AN OPEN SOURCE

Hackers are characterized by bravado, showmanship, mischievousness, and a deep mistrust of authority.

If you consume any content on the Internet, you’re mostly consuming content created by people who for some reason spend most of their time and energy creating content on the Internet. And those people clearly differ from the general population in important ways.11

Increasingly, our online worlds are being built by individuals, not just communities.‡

Source by an Accidental Revolutionary,”

first improving their distribution,

Like other creators, open source developers rely heavily upon platforms to distribute their work.

Platforms deliver value to third parties that build on top of them,