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

Kraut and Resnick observe that a community needs to “protect itself from the potentially damaging actions” of newcomers in order to survive,127 since newcomers can destabilize preexisting social norms: “Because newcomers have not yet developed commitment to the group and have not yet learned how the group operates, it is rational for established gr

YouTube creators experience “an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording.”

By connecting towns to one another, highways change communities’ underlying social structure. Highways enable migration and cross-pollination of ideas. Without highways, residents tend to stay in the towns they grew up in. When these pathways are opened, collective identity is eroded. Instead of “competing for status in small tribes,” people find t

A few of the conditions that Benkler identifies as necessary to pull off commons-based peer production are intrinsic motivation, modular and granular tasks, and low coordination costs.

But repository refers specifically to the file directory that contains code, whereas project implies the full set of tools and communication channels that support the code (e.g., mailing lists, chat, documentation, and Q&A sites).

Anyone can propose a change to an open source project in the form of a “patch”—or to use GitHub’s nomenclature, a pull request—but these changes undergo reviews and are subject to approval from prior trusted contributors.

The GitHub generation of open source developers doesn’t feel particularly strongly about these issues. They just want to make things, and sharing is a natural byproduct of those efforts.

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.

To early free and open source developers, the move toward standard tools and workflows, shepherded by a single company like GitHub (acquired by Microsoft in 2018), represented a backslide against everything they had been fighting for since the 1980s. Code collaboration wasn’t supposed to belong to anyone, and especially not to a multibillion-dollar