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

by Nadia Asparouhova

Even with all the resources in the world, companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook can’t meet the cost of user support alone. Instead, they rely on public support forums. Poorly implemented support forums can feel like ghost towns, where users shout questions into the void in hopes that someone is paying attention. But when enough people ask and answer questions, users are often in a better position to help one another than an official support team is. In open source, maintainers frequently push user support questions onto forums like Stack Overflow or group chats like Discord or Slack, where users can help answer one another’s questions. In 2018, I analyzed a set of the top one hundred open source projects by issue volume, and found that 89% were using something besides GitHub issues to manage their support needs, listing an average of two additional channels. The most popular channels were dedicated forums (41%) and Stack Overflow (38%), followed by IRC (22%), Gitter (20%), and mailing lists (18%).

Ben Thompson, suggesting that subscriptions could be the future of local news, defines subscriptions as such: First, it’s not a donation: it is asking a customer to pay money for a product. What, then, is the product? It is not, in fact, any one article (a point that is missed by the misguided focus on micro-transactions). Rather, a subscriber is paying for the regular delivery of well-defined value. Each of those words is meaningful: Paying: A subscription is an ongoing commitment to the production of content, not a one-off payment for one piece of content that catches the eye. Regular Delivery: A subscriber does not need to depend on the random discovery of content; said content can be delivered to to [sic] the subscriber directly, whether that be email, a bookmark, or an app. Well-defined Value: A subscriber needs to know what they are paying for, and it needs to be worth it.319 Thompson notes that subscriptions only work when the content is differentiated: “After all, it’s not like it is hard to find content to read on the Internet: what people will pay for is quality content about things they care about.” But who provides the content is a form of differentiation in itself. Subscriptions are uniquely suited to monetizing “the regular delivery of well-defined value.” Because subscriptions are recurring, they help solve for the shortcomings of prior funding models. Patents and royalties have long existed to incentivize the creation of intellectual property, but IP is jus...

Source: https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business-model/

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.

In “1,000 True Fans,” a blog post first published back in 2008 and now part of internet canon, the writer Kevin Kelly points to the value of a small, avid audience. In an updated version of this post, he writes, To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans. A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce.327 While we might debate the exact number of fans that creators ought to reach, the spirit of Kelly’s post still stands. Even if an open source project is used by 100% of websites on the internet, the harder part, ironically, is making enough meaning for 1,000 people: becoming visible and present enough that they care what happens to you and your project, versus any other opportunity out there.

Bounties can be effective when the tasks are vetted by maintainers themselves, and when they fund well-scoped, finite tasks that are specialized or otherwise difficult to attract talent for, such as design work or database migration. For example, security bounties tend to work well because they tap into a wider pool of developers with specialized skills, encouraging them to tackle a one-off task that a project’s maintainers might not otherwise accomplish on their own. For security-related issues, it’s actually better when the participating developers aren’t already familiar with the codebase, because they bring a fresh set of eyes.

The history of software gives us insight into how our attitudes toward content are changing. In the twentieth century, code was bundled into physical formats—a book, a floppy disk, a CD—which made it easier to price and sell. As code became liberated from these formats, and eventually distributed under open source licenses, it became harder to directly charge for. With millions of lines of code freely available today, the focus has shifted from what developers make to who they are.

When people talk about the “attention economy,” they’re usually referring to the consumer’s limited attention, as when multiple apps compete for a user’s time. But a producer’s limited attention is just as important to consider. As audience engagement grows, more consumers appropriate attention from creators. So it’s critical to find ways to manage this demand, especially extractive demand, which includes comments, reactions, direct messages, and other requests for interaction. A tragedy of the commons occurs not from consumers over-appropriating the content itself, but from consumers over-appropriating a creator’s attention.*

Our social platforms were built for distributed, small-scale, many-to-many use cases: the quaint social world of yesteryear. They were modeled after internet forums, chat groups, and mailing lists, because these were the only blueprints that we had for our online social infrastructure. As more people flocked to these platforms, we saw a few bridges collapse, because, it turns out, we had no idea how to build bridges for today’s world. The aftermath of the 2016 United States presidential election saw Facebook wholly unprepared for its new role as a steward of civil society. But platforms are learning from those mistakes and rebuilding their services with new knowledge that we’re still uncovering today. If you imagine a music concert that keeps adding attendees until it becomes a rousing crowd, you can understand the effect of adding more people to our social platforms. When six people are gathered, they can all talk to one another; everyone is engaged in the same conversation. When a thousand people are gathered, they divide into two types of interaction. There’s the broadcasting effect, when someone climbs onstage to control the crowd and everyone turns to watch. And then there’s the small-group effect, when people strike up side conversations with their neighbors, ignoring the main stage.

The first wave of monetization was about making meaning of the big. Display advertising, for example, operates as a function of viewership. Pricing is typically based on CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, and CPC, or cost per click, both of which require a lot of views to make these numbers meaningful. These days, as consumers are faced with near-infinite options, making money as a creator is about making meaning of the small again: Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans,” finally come to pass. We’re seeing renewed interest in subscription models, sponsorships, and merchandise, all of which operate as a function of parasocial, or one-sided, intimacy.

As for subscriptions, paywalls might seem like a way to monetize content, but, really, what creators are monetizing is their community, whether by offering a closer connection to the creator, like-minded people to talk to, or a safe haven from extractive contributors. A paywall is more like the ticket kiosk at a theme park than a price tag on a car. Most comments aren’t useful, so charging readers to leave a comment helps ensure that participants have meaningful skin in the game. Creators charge money in order to make social interactions meaningful again.

Putting all content behind a paywall isn’t likely to work well for creators or publishers, with the exception of a few heavy hitters (say, The New York Times). Similarly, micropayments—where consumers pay small sums for a specific piece of content, such as paying to unlock a specific article—don’t usually add up to much either (again, unless you’re The New York Times, and can play upon a reader’s fear of missing out). Micropayments make the transaction about content, rather than about creators, but because there is so much freely available, highly substitutable content they create decision fatigue for consumers.362

Subscription models can operate like a freemium model, but they get even more interesting as a two-sided market. In a freemium model, a creator gives away some of their content for free, but restricts other content to those with paid subscriptions. The free content helps creators grow their reputation via public network effects. In a two-sided market, paying subscribers subsidize all of the content for nonpaying readers, under the assumption that creators aren’t actually selling content but a sense of membership and identity. Instead of charging, say, all 100,000 readers ten cents to read an article, creators can instead give away the article for free, but charge 1,000 extra-dedicated subscribers ten dollars per year.

Finally, the news industry is a useful case study to demonstrate how different funding models might apply to different types of content creators. Like “open source,” “news” doesn’t refer to just one type of content. Also like open source, there are a few big newspapers (The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and others), which don’t fully capture the experience of the rest of the news industry, much like Linux doesn’t reflect the experience of most open source projects. With the continued unbundling of newspapers, we’ll likely see different models that work for different types of writers. As Damon Kiesow, a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, puts it, “National and local journalism are not the same business. The New York Times can chase scale for profit, The Centre Daily Times can’t. Because what the New York Times has is an audience. In College Park, they have a community.”

Social media is arguably supplanting the need for “breaking news” reporters. Like casual contributors to an open source project, eyewitnesses post about a breaking news event because they are intrinsically motivated to do so. The fact that local news outlets frequently appear in eyewitnesses’ comments, asking them for the right to use their images, tells us that average citizens are becoming a better breaking news source for major media outlets, rather than the other way around. Breaking news is the equivalent of casual contributions in open source: those who are closest to the problem have an intrinsic desire to “contribute” with no expectation of financial reward, but also have no desire to stick around after making their contribution. Most people who post about a breaking news event don’t want to become news reporters; they just want to share and move on. Similarly, most casual contributors have no desire to join a “contributor community” or become maintainers; they’re there to fix their own problem and move on.

For news reporting that focuses on a specific vertical, we’ll see a shift that looks like the shift from “funding projects” to “funding people,” which we explored in Chapter 5. As media companies shift toward “atomized” creators, journalists will find it easier to independently monetize their own reputations, much like any other content creator. Readers will pay for a curated, high-quality take on their interests, as well as, sometimes, a sense of community with other like-minded readers.

Overall, I’d expect to see in the news industry something similar to what happened in open source: a “dumbbell”-shaped distribution of contributors. On one end are purely casual contributors (breaking news, casual punditry, and commentary on the news), who post on social media because it’s low-effort with the potential for a bit of upside, and no expectation of maintenance, funding, or having to make ongoing contributions. On the other end are the maintainers (news columns, investigative journalism, and features): those with in-depth knowledge of their topic, who make highly non-fungible contributions, and who will make money off their reputations. For those in the latter category, the name of the game is building highly targeted audiences and optimizing for fewer people paying more money, rather than shilling for page views. Podcasts, newsletters, and longform writing are attractive these days because they help creators filter for niche audiences, rather than losing potential value to broad reach on public channels. Instead of maximizing for likes, these creators maximize for meaning. An interesting implication here is that a creator’s relevance (to some niche audience) matters more than quality or trust on a global scale. Early newspaper and media brands built their reputations on the promise of truth and “objectivity,” whereas it seems more likely that future media brands will build their reputations on the promise of relevance. I’d argue that the reason this funding sh...

Transitions are hard, but when it comes to making money as a creator online, I feel more optimistic about these opportunities than ever. We’re moving toward a future where rewards are heavily influenced by the quality of one’s audience more than its size. This affords creators an enormous degree of freedom and helps perpetuate the renaissance of ideas that is already well underway. We don’t have all the answers yet, but I’m hoping this book helps point us toward the right questions.