I’ve been reading Nadia Eghbal’s “Working in Public”. The book gives an unusual outside view on open source software, emphasising the social dynamics at play and the hazards faced by maintainers. It would be a good resource for anyone interested in contributing. I was quickly called out in a paragraph about burnout:
Even paid open source developers seem to go through the same strange behavioral cycle … 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.
Part of the problem, as the book’s opening describes, is that so many projects are solo performances. Even crucial infrastructure may be maintained thanklessly by one person over years, which makes funding and security harder (as the recent XZ backdoor neatly illustrates). And yet, I don’t think this is the failure of the internet’s collaborative ideals that it’s painted as. Components are isolated, but touch anything on a computer – load a Python package, open a web page – and you use a mind-boggling number of those components, created by an even mind-boggling-er number of people. Small, self-contained and loosely connected parts let the whole be self-organising, which is what allows such unprecedented cooperation in the first place. The “vision, embraced by early internet pioneers, of large-scale collaboration among strangers” seems to me very much alive.