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. From the perspective of these maintainers, quietly tending to their code on the prairie amidst the tumbleweeds of unanswered issues, the world doesn’t look like the utopian vision, embraced by early internet pioneers, of large-scale collaboration among strangers. If anything, it looks like exactly the opposite of what these early advocates predicted.
