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

by Nadia Asparouhova

The academic system provides us with a blueprint of how a closed reputation economy for software might work. Researchers write and publish papers, which garner citations from other researchers, which theoretically earn the authors more negotiating power, and, eventually, tenure. But academia fails to create commensurate rewards for open source developers. Fernando Pérez is the author of Jupyter, a set of open source tools and services for interactive computing, used by researchers and companies around the world. It is arguably one of the most impactful pieces of scientific software in circulation today. Yet Pérez, a physicist by training, had trouble finding a tenured academic position for many years. Similarly, Tom Caswell, lead developer for Matplotlib, a data-plotting tool for Python, and Andreas Müller, core developer of scikit-learn, a machine learning library for Python, both have PhDs but are employed in non-tenure-track positions. There is a sense among developers in research-related fields that, while writing open source software can have other benefits, it doesn’t fit into the academic reputation system. Writing open source software with a lot of users doesn’t attract as much prestige as publishing a paper with a lot of citations.