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

by Nadia Asparouhova

Firstly, software, once written, is never really finished. It might be feature-complete, but, in order to continue running, software almost always requires some sort of ongoing maintenance. At minimum, that might mean keeping dependencies up-to-date, but it might also mean things like upgrading infrastructure to meet demand, fixing bugs, or updating documentation. So-called “greenfield” projects—those where a developer gets to write software from scratch—are coveted for a reason. Most of the work that software developers do is not writing new code, but rather tending to the code that someone else has written. Nathan Ensmenger, a professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University, suggests that “most computer programmers begin their careers doing software maintenance, and many never do anything but.”