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

by Nadia Asparouhova

Eric S. Raymond once coined the aphorism “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” His point is that open source software presents an advantage over closed source software, because if more people can inspect the code it will increase the chance that more bugs will be discovered. The implication is that support can be handled in a fully decentralized manner that will distribute its costs among users.* But as Fred Brooks wryly notes in his classic engineering book The Mythical Man-Month, first published two decades before Raymond made his claim, although “more users find more bugs,” this results in a type of support cost that grows, and is “strongly affected by the number of users.”213 As more people use open source software, more questions will be asked, and more bugs will be found—but someone still needs to review, manage, and process these reports. Devon Zuegel, a product manager at GitHub, refers to these as the “servicing costs” of software, noting the “asymmetry between the low cost of community participation and the high cost that others’ participation places on the leaders of the community.” She compares the problem to traffic congestion caused by automobiles, where each person wants to drive their own car, but in doing so increases the congestion experienced by others, and, eventually, themself.