Updates

  1. Person pages list letters, writing, profiles and links as sortable tables with filters, and show each person's companies as links; Fund letters show each letter's description in its own column.
  2. Experts show a checked job title and a short description of each person; 30 more people have photographs.
  3. Every company, fund, university and publication the experts work for has a page listing the people there.
  4. Fund letters show each letter's thesis and filter by it; 225 person pages list the essays, columns and newsletter issues the person wrote.
  5. Person pages list every essay and newsletter issue a person wrote, and their own books as a table in List view.
  6. Recommends shows the five largest kinds of book and the rest under More; browse pictures load sooner.
  7. Podcasts and talks link the original episode, filter by Audio and video or Press, and list each publisher once.
  8. Pages are wider, Recommends has List and Grid, and a filter clicked again turns off.
  9. Book cards sit in a ruled grid with Open Library and Goodreads links and each book's one-line note.
  10. Funds is now Investors; each investor's styles are buttons that filter the table.
  11. Podcasts and talks on a person's page filter by year and publisher and show as a list or a grid of pictures.
  12. Quotes show only people's own words: 472 summaries written by list sites are gone.
  13. Country pages open from Browse again, and every link on the shelf lands on a page.
  14. Subject and person pages show their sections as tabs, and each book appears once on a person's page.
  15. Book cards show the quote, who said it and the source; grids show five cards to a row.
  16. On a phone, a menu holds the sections, search, Updates, Feedback and dark mode.
  17. Feedback takes a screenshot of the page with no browser prompt, opens a screenshot full size when you click it, and clears itself once sent.
  18. Book cards are centred, search names the topic each book sits in, and any text cut short shows whole on hover.
  19. Search groups its results by kind: people, companies, geographies, subjects, topics, books, funds, fund letters and papers.
  20. The Books table lists who recommended each book by name, and the browser tab names the section you are in.
  21. Feedback can take a screenshot of the page, or one you paste or choose, and opens in the corner beside Updates.
  22. Each rail button reopens its section where you left it, and Browse, Table and People show on every book and subject page.
  23. Filters grey out choices that hold nothing instead of hiding them, and Books › People filters by authors or recommenders.
  24. Feedback takes a subject line and up to three screenshots.
  25. Biographies are grouped by the person they are about: 41 new pages, from Abraham Lincoln to Lee Kuan Yew.
  26. Sport splits into 23 sports, and Religion into one topic per faith.
  27. Book lists show as cards: the cover, one recommendation quote and every recommender by name.
  28. Seventeen subjects that had two or three pages under different names now have one page each.
  29. Every page lists its Experts as authors and recommenders, with a link to them on the Experts tab.
  30. Economics, Financial history, Financial panics and Accounting are subjects of their own, with one page per financial crisis.
  31. Book, person and subject pages open inside the app, so the tabs stay in view.
  32. 996 more book covers, and photographs or logos for 227 more people and companies.
  33. Books › Browse shows every subject as cards, and the rail holds Fund letters, Papers, Experts, Books and Funds.
  34. Every topic over 150 books splits into narrower topics, each with a page of its own.

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Working in Public

Working in Public

Nadia Eghbal
2020
T2 256 pages · about 4h 16m to read Open Librarygoodreads

Maintainer economics: who actually pays for open source, and how.

Summary

Eghbal worked on open source sustainability at GitHub and wrote this analysis of how open source software is actually produced and maintained, which differs substantially from the community-based picture that dominates discussion of it.

Her central empirical claim is that most widely used open source projects are maintained by a very small number of people, frequently one, and that the contributor community that discussions assume is largely absent. She presents a taxonomy of project structures based on contributor growth and user growth: federations with high of both, clubs with high contributor and low user growth, stadiums with high user and low contributor growth, and toys with low of both. Her argument is that stadiums, meaning projects with enormous user bases and one or two maintainers, are the dominant and least understood form.

Her analysis of the maintainer's position follows from this. The scarce resource is not code or money but the maintainer's attention, and every user request, issue and pull request consumes it. Contributions frequently cost more attention to review and integrate than they save, which reverses the standard assumption that more contributors help.

She covers funding models, the platform dynamics that made distribution free while making attention scarce, and the analogy to content creators who face the same structure of enormous audiences and individual production. The book is analytical rather than prescriptive and offers no solution to the sustainability problem. It is specific to open source software and the extension to other creative production is suggestive. The reframing of the scarce resource as attention rather than as labour or money is the contribution.

Key takeaways 8

  1. Most widely used open source projects are maintained by one or a very small number of people rather than by a contributor community.
  2. Projects with enormous user bases and almost no contributors are the dominant and least understood form of open source production.
  3. The scarce resource is the maintainer's attention rather than code or money, and every issue and request consumes it.
  4. Contributions frequently cost more attention to review and integrate than the work they save, which reverses the assumption that more contributors help.
  5. Distribution became free while attention became scarce, which is the platform dynamic that produced the current structure.
  6. Funding a project does not solve the problem if the constraint is the maintainer's attention rather than their income.
  7. Open source maintainers face the same structure as content creators, with enormous audiences and individual production.
  8. The book analyses the problem and offers no solution to it, which the author states directly.

Who should read it

Founders and investors who depend on open source, and anyone whose work involves a large audience served by individual production.

Who recommended it 2

Balaji S. Srinivasanreported
Delian Asparouhovreported

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Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.

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Producing Open Source SoftwareProducing Open Source Software
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Rebel CodeRebel Code
T2 Rebel Code
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The reporting history of Linux and the businesses built around it.

Where it sits in the reference 2

Open source and commercial open source
Business models
Software and SaaS
Industries

Topics

Technology and ComputingProgramming and computer science