Making is show business now (2020)

&gt; Something important changed between the 90s and today. If you look at most open source projects now, the distribution of who’s doing the work versus who’s simply there is skewed dramatically: it’s common to see projects where 95% of the work is done by a nucleus of people, perhaps even a single developer, with a long tail of “contributors”<p>Any evidence this has actually changed between the 90s and now?<p>I have a strong suspicion that it&#x27;s always been this way.<p>There are exceptional projects where the work is more distributed (is Linux an example?), but my suspicion is that they were exceptional in the 90s and still are, and that all along most projects have this &quot;dramatic skew&quot; as described.<p>For software of now, you can look at github. For software of the 90s, 2000s... I wonder if anyone has tried to research this?<p>I definitely don&#x27;t see any reason to assume it was different without evidence.

I think the author is missing a key point in that software is vastly more complex than it was in the 90’s. The few times I’ve tried to contribute to open source, I spent more time trying to convince projects that my pull requests fixed the problem without causing other issues. And this is largely because my fixes tend to fix integration problems I had with the software. These weren’t small changes that could be unit tested, and setting up test repro steps were non trivial. I don’t blame maintainers for being slow to accept these kinds of fixes, when the bugs are likely to effect a small minority of users. 30 years ago you could look at a patch and at least reason about it’s efficacy, now you have to have some idea about supporting ecosystems, and not just libraries you’re already using.

I think one of the biggest changes over the past decade or so is that the values and the <i>perception</i> of the values that participants offer has changed.<p>It used to be that you wanted your open source code to be popular because having users like and use your stuff felt good. There wasn&#x27;t really much &quot;fame&quot; or career boost to be an open source maintainer. The users themselves and the positive feedback they provided were basically the sole intrinsic motivation.<p>But now companies look at open source contributions when it comes to hiring. You can get paid speaking gigs or use keynote talks to further your career. Having a lot of users means a maintainer can extract value from <i>other sources</i>. And users <i>know</i> that now. They now that their tiny popularity vote is transferring something valuable to the maintainer who may then use it elsewhere. That leads to entitlement.<p>In GitHub these days, I often see PRs and issues where the contributor or person filing the bug clearly thinks the maintainer &quot;owes&quot; them something in return for their support. It&#x27;s like, &quot;Hey, I&#x27;m making you be popular, so do what I say.&quot; That kills the intrinsic reward maintainers used to feel because now it feels transactional and obligatory.<p>My experience is that almost everyone filing issues and PRs is well-meaning and helpful. But it only takes a few cranky ones to suck a lot of the fun out. And even the good ones can be draining at a certain scale, though no fault of their own. Managing those social demands takes emotional skills that many maintainers don&#x27;t have. After all, part of the reason many of us got into software is because we found human interaction difficult or anxiety-inducing.

In the 1990&#x27;s, the only people using the software tended to be people capable of debugging the problems. Now due to maturity, code complexity, and the simple fact that there are a lot of &quot;users&quot; means that its a lot bigger deal if a random patch breaks something.<p>Its the result of the success of the project more than anything. Now the maintainers have to start acting like real developers and do the difficult&#x2F;unsexy parts of maintaining something rather than just hacking at the fun bits.<p>It really points out that much of what people considered the strengths of the opensource model were illusions that evaporated when the ratio of users&#x2F;developers got very large. That doesn&#x27;t mean its not a valid model, only that its a mistake to think a project can both be successful and popular while simultaneously expecting everything to be done by volunteers.

This is one of my primary objections to the cultural shift of the last 10 years towards trying to attract tons of random people, especially special interest groups, into open source software development. If they weren&#x27;t naturally going to contribute anyway in the previous environment, the expected value of their contribution in the current environment is very low. Possibly negative after considering the drain on the maintainer(s).

Even with tools like github, which are supposed to make collaboration easier, it is still incredibly difficult to contribute meaningfully to an open source project.<p>I actually had a job where I had the privilege of modifying an open source tool as part of my day-to-day job. Even there, I found it very difficult to give back to the project because the maintainers of the project weren&#x27;t terribly interest in having or maintaining the enterprise-y, cloud-y features that I was implementing.<p>It seems like most OSS projects have a single key contributor &#x2F; BDFL who decides the direction of the project. Outside of financial incentives, it&#x27;s hard to get groups of people moving in the same direction.

This is pretty discouraging honestly, from the perspective of what the article calls a “fan”. I like to make small contributions to projects I use when I can, but I don’t become a core dev on any of them.<p>Is it really not worth the maintainers time to merge a bug fix or look at an issue I opened? Are they just doing it as “fan service”?<p>Genuinely, does this type of “participation” really waste more time than it saves on the whole?<p>That seems to be the implication of the article. I wonder if any open source maintainers can chime in.

This reminds me of a book I enjoyed, Show Your Work. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;austinkleon.com&#x2F;show-your-work&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;austinkleon.com&#x2F;show-your-work&#x2F;</a>

Do you personally contribute to some random FOSS project? Usually these projects are big and it&#x27;s just too much work up front to implement a tiny feature which you don&#x27;t even know if it will be accepted upstream. I&#x27;d rather spend that time working on my own pet projects.<p>I happen to have a project that is fairly successful and all of the substantial contributions are from _big_ companies (think Google, Uber, Airbnb, etc) who have the cash to pay their employees for days or weeks of OSS contributions. Independent private&#x2F;free-time contributors only make small changes despite the project being quite small.<p>A very interesting thing is that there is one contributor of my projects who appears to make a huge number of very simple pull-requests to a wide variety (literally hundreds) of projects. Things like fixing typos, dependency updates, and so on but I don&#x27;t think he&#x27;s a bot, so I have been wondering why he is doing this.

I thought this was going to be about the Maker Movement and how huge some of these channels have gotten on YouTube

I up voted based on the converse application to the headline, wherein a programmer makes his program more fun by adding ah fictional character to do his logging statements like a story.

There is a bigger story here is that EVERY business is show business now — it’s just that not everyone recognizes it yet.

&gt;<i>If you go back to the 90s, when we first figured out how communities built software, it took a lot of work to use the internet. It wasn’t fast or easy, but that made it special: it meant that everyone on the internet cared about it, a lot. You were really committed to being there. Online communities back then were like a federation of villages; each one had its own culture, its own customs, and its own values. The open source community was like that too, and remained so for a long time.</i><p>&gt;<i>In these kinds of environments, attracting more users really did advance open source projects, because the costs were usually worth it. When a new member joined a community, they were probably serious about it. There weren’t many “tourists” back then, so there was a real environment of camaraderie. Existing users were happy to onboard you and teach you things, because their effort would likely pay off as a good investment.</i><p>&gt;<i>Since community members joined slowly and stuck around, there was a lot of trust and shared context in the group. Every community had a different way of working, so there was a fair amount of friction preventing users from jumping around or “surfing” from project to project. Groups could preserve and maintain their collective motivation to keep shipping; they weren’t getting paid, so that motivation was everything.</i><p>&gt;<i>It sounds pretty idyllic, and for many users back then, it was. As the internet grew more popular, the old timers reliably complained every September as a new crop of college freshmen gained access for the first time, not knowing any of the social conventions. AOL opened the floodgates in 1993, which Usenet bitterly declared “Eternal September”, and the internet veterans have been complaining about it since.</i><p>&gt;<i>We know what happened next with online content. The tapestry of forums and newsgroups that made up the early internet flourished for a while, but in the 2000s an invasive species arrived: the platforms. The platforms made it so easy to create, share, distribute and discover that everyone joined them, smushing everything together into common, user-friendly formats without the local context or nuance of the smaller groups.</i><p>It seems to be an: Oh, let me tell you about the good ole&#x27; days when the internet sucked so badly that it amplified natural selection and all the twenty people on it could hack on the Linux kernel and the output was amazing. Now that any peasant can get on the information highway and participate, everything is ruined.