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.

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

“when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates

Code, like any other type of content available online today, is trending toward modularity: a mille-feuille layer cake of little libraries instead of one big, jiggling Jell-O mold. Today, developers publish bits of code online, for public use, as easily as others discover and use them. But just as tweets are easy to read and retweet without context

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

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

the world doesn’t look like the utopian vision, embraced by early internet pioneers, of large-scale collaboration among strangers.

02: THE STRUCTURE OF AN OPEN SOURCE

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.