Working in Public

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.