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

by Nadia Asparouhova

While static code does not change over time, code in active state is closely intertwined with its dependencies, meaning other code that runs with it. If software is a LEGO house, each of its dependencies can be thought of as a LEGO brick. An open source project might be one of those bricks, with a different project, maintained by another group of developers, forming another brick. Over time, code falls out of sync with its dependencies, becoming incompatible with newer versions of those dependencies. Even if your code doesn’t change, everything else around it changes. Code that hasn’t been touched in five years can’t be executed on a modern machine without some updates, unless a developer replicates its exact circumstances (also known as a developer’s environment), using tools such as containers or emulators. Developers might choose to stick with older versions of their dependencies, but if they ever update those dependencies something will likely break and require changes to make it all run together.