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

Code, like any other type of content available online today, is trending toward modularity:

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.

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.

developers failed to capture the economic value they created:

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

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

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.

such initiatives often attract low-quality contributions.