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

by Nadia Asparouhova

Much of the fatigue that open source developers experience comes not from making their code public but from expectations around making their code participatory.

Open source code itself is not a common pool resource but a positive externality of its underlying contributor community. Users can consume, or “appropriate,” code at zero marginal cost, because what the commons actually manages is not code but attention. When developers make contributions, they appropriate this attention from the commons.

Every developer tries to reduce the amount of maintenance work they need to do over time. But software is never done, and also never dies: the cost of maintaining a project can be near-zero, but it is asymptotic.

Fundamentally, social platforms like Twitter and Facebook still follow the post-and-comment model of an earlier era, where interactions with the author are frictionless, even encouraged. These platforms struggle, more than any other, to adapt to modern social needs. One problem is that these platforms assume that all users are interchangeable, whereas in a one-to-many broadcasting format creators are a particular, non-fungible type of user.

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.

I’d argue that the reason this funding shift has taken so much longer in journalism—much like in open source—compared to other forms of content creation is because it requires sloughing off preexisting social norms. Twitch and YouTube creators, for example, essentially created their medium along with the platform, whereas open source and journalism are still grappling with the inherited models of their predecessors.