An inside look at modern open source software development and its
influence on our online social world.
Open source software, in which developers publish code that anyone can
use, has long served as a bellwether for other online behavior. In the
late 1990s, it provided an optimistic model for public collaboration,
but in the last 20 years it's shifted to solo operators who write and
publish code that's consumed by millions.
In Working in Public, Nadia Eghbal takes an inside look at modern open
source software development, its evolution over the last two decades,
and its ramifications for an internet reorienting itself around
individual creators. Eghbal, who interviewed hundreds of developers
while working to improve their experience at GitHub, argues that modern
open source offers us a model through which to understand the challenges
faced by online creators. She examines the trajectory of open source
projects, including:
- The GitHub platform for hosting and development
- The structures, roles, incentives, and relationships involved in open
source projects
- The often-overlooked maintenance required of its creators
- The costs of production that endure through an application's lifetime.
Eghbal also scrutinizes the role of platforms like Twitter, Facebook,
Twitch, YouTube, and Instagram, which reduce infrastructure and
distribution costs for creators but which massively increase the scope
of interactions with their audience.
Open source communities are increasingly centered around the work of
individual developers rather than teams. Similarly, if creators, rather
than discrete communities, are going to become the epicenter of our
online social systems, we need to better understand how they work--and
we can do so by studying what happened to open source.
