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

Working In Public, despite being a superlative book-length tour of the open source movement, isn’t really about collaborative software development. It’s really about how a virtualized, digital world decoupled from the physical constraints of manufacturing and meatspace politics manages to both pay for and govern itself despite no official legal fra... See more

But sometimes the mystery escapes even practitioners: many of the selfless contributors Eghbal quotes have trouble making ends meet, and either do freelance consulting on the very code they created, set up Patreons like other struggling artists, or hold down day jobs often not even related to their projects.

And all this happened with surprisingly little at stake: in the case of open source the main incentive is just individual software engineers gaining prestige and high-paying jobs. Nadia Eghbal has written extensively about the incentive problems in the open source community holding back progress.

I was first attracted to open source – public code that everybody relies upon – after observing that its developers are creating trillions of dollars in economic value, while giving away their code for free.

Eghbal writes: “The default hypothesis today is that, faced with growing demand, an open source “maintainer” - the term used to refer to the primary developer, or developers, of a software project - needs to find more contributors. It’s commonly thought that open source software is built by communities, which means that anyone can pitch in, thus di... See more