Top Highlights

• Initially, I focused my explorations on a lack of funding. Many open source developers are not directly paid for their work, despite generating trillions of dollars in economic value. In the absence of additional reputational or financial benefits, maintaining code for general public use quickly becomes an unpaid job you can’t quit.
• The cycle looks something like this: Open source developers write and publish their code in public. They enjoy months, maybe years, in the spotlight. But, eventually, popularity offers diminishing returns. If the value of maintaining code fails to outpace the rewards, many of these developers quietly retreat to the shadows.
• However, in speaking to maintainers privately, I learned that these initiatives frequently cause them to seize with anxiety, because such initiatives often attract low-quality contributions. This creates more work for maintainers—all contributions, after all, must be reviewed before they are accepted. Maintainers frequently lack infrastructure to b...
• I started to see the problem is not that there’s a dearth of people who want to contribute to an open source project, but rather that there are too many contributors—or they’re the wrong kind of contributors. Open source code is public, but it doesn’t have to be participatory: maintainers can buckle under excess demand for their attention.
• This distribution—where one or a few developers do most of the work, followed by a long tail of casual contributors, and many more passive users—is now the norm, not the exception, in open source.