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

The cult of personality thrives in JavaScript, even if its most prominent developers are reluctant to acknowledge it, perhaps because this attitude clashes with the professed ideal of open source as “community-built.” Compared to early renowned hackers like Torvalds, Raymond, and Stallman, many of today’s JavaScript developers are unusually humble.

With a single install command, developers could now pull in hundreds of packages—chunks of code written by other developers—and use them in their own code. As a result, the idea of what might constitute an “open source project” became smaller, too, not unlike the shift from blog posts to tweets.

Steve Klabnik, a developer known for his work in Rust and Ruby, two popular programming language communities, points to how outdated vocabulary limits our ability to talk about how open source is produced: Why is it a problem that the concepts of free software and open source are intrinsically tied to licenses? It’s that the aims and goals of both

Ben Thompson, who writes about business and technology on his blog, Stratechery, goes so far as to suggest that delivering this kind of value is, itself, the definition of a platform, as opposed to aggregators. Platforms deliver value to third parties that build on top of them, whereas aggregators are pure intermediaries.

Richard Stallman, the MIT hacker who’s generally credited with starting the free software movement, was inspired to launch the GNU project, a free software operating system, in 1983, after attempting to customize a Xerox printer in MIT’s AI Lab and finding that he could not access or modify its source code. Stallman wanted to liberate code from pro

Before there was a de facto platform for hosting code, most open source code was published as a “tarball” (named for the .tar file, which bundles files together) on some self-hosted, stand-alone website. Developers used mailing lists to communicate and collaborate. And every project managed its contributions a little bit differently. Much like visi

But over the last twenty years, open source inexplicably skewed from a collaborative to a solo endeavor. And while more people use open source code than ever before, its developers failed to capture the economic value they created: a paradox that makes them just as interesting to reexamine today.

Early internet activity was characterized by large-scale, distributed online communities: mailing lists, online forums, membership groups. These communities operated as a cluster of villages, each with its own culture, history, and norms. Social platforms brought all these communities to one place and smashed them together like Play-Doh. In doing s

it’s not the excessive consumption of code but the excessive participation from users vying for a maintainer’s attention that has made the work untenable for maintainers today.