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

These developers aren’t building communities; they’re directing air traffic.

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).

bus factor, where project health is measured by the number of developers that would need to get hit by a bus before the project is in trouble.

aggregators are pure intermediaries.

sifting through the noise of interactions, such as user questions, bug reports, and feature requests, which compete for their attention.

This distribution—where one or a few developers do most of the work, followed by a long tail of casual contributors, and many more passive users—is now the norm, not the exception, in open source.

these platforms also bear the responsibility of helping creators grow their reputations and capture the value of their efforts.

how our economy might reorient itself around individual creators and the platforms upon which they build.

Although the Linux Foundation reports more than 14,000 contributors to the Linux kernel since 2005,24 Torvalds is still the only person who’s allowed to merge those contributions into the main project.25