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

by Nadia Asparouhova

Even Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian’s Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, a 1999 book widely regarded as the definitive text on the economics of information goods, hardly gives open source software a glance, instead treating software as a commodity to be bought and sold by companies.

Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole’s “The Simple Economics of Open Source” was published in 2000, but it contains analysis and observations that are still trenchant today.

Daniel Stenberg, author of the command-line tool cURL, didn’t realize he had created one of the most widely used software projects in the world until people told him “they saw his name in the ‘about’ window of software, or buried in documentation,” many years into cURL’s development.170

One maintainer, who has created hundreds of popular libraries, described to me what he does when he gets tired of maintaining them. Using a “ghost” admin account that he has purposely forgotten the password to, he transfers his unwanted projects to that account, then removes his main account as administrator. This way, he explained rather cheerfully, nobody will bother him about maintenance, because he cannot access the project anymore, even if he tries. If anybody wants to change the code, instead of bugging him they’ll simply have to fork and maintain it themselves. While this practice works well for him, it illustrates how a popular and widely depended-upon project could have literally nobody at the helm.

In Sarah T. Roberts’s Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadow of Social Media, she quotes Max Breen, a pseudonymous content moderator for an unnamed tech company, who notes that this kind of work is extremely non-fungible, even among human moderators: “I don’t think [outsourcing] works because . . . the culture is so dramatically different when you are trying to apply a policy that is based on [Western] culture.”300 Breen continues, “They tried outsourcing to India before I was there, and it was such a disaster that they just canceled it and said we have to do this all in-house.”

Paying for code quality tends to work better for inelastic goods, where few substitutes to the project exist.

The Apache Foundation is structured specifically so that individuals only represent themselves, rather than their employers.310

Taylor Swift explains how she maintains her sanity while occupying a highly visible position: One thing I do to lessen this weird insecurity laser beam is to turn off comments. Yes, I keep comments off on my posts. That way, I’m showing my friends and fans updates on my life, but I’m training my brain to not need the validation of someone telling me that I look . I’m also blocking out anyone who might feel the need to tell me to “go die in a hole ho” while I’m having my coffee at nine in the morning.355

In a two-sided market, paying subscribers subsidize all of the content for nonpaying readers, under the assumption that creators aren’t actually selling content but a sense of membership and identity. Instead of charging, say, all 100,000 readers ten cents to read an article, creators can instead give away the article for free, but charge 1,000 extra-dedicated subscribers ten dollars per year. Journalist Tim Carmody, for example, subsidizes his newsletter Amazon Chronicles this way.363 Paying subscribers make it possible for him to offer the newsletter for free to everyone: The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don’t just permit but insist that the product be given away for free. The value comes not just what [sic] they’re buying, but who they’re buying it from and who gets to enjoy it. The bigger those two pools get—the bigger the membership, and the bigger the audience—the better it gets for everyone. . . . PBS as a service.364