Revisiting the cathedral/bazaar 20 years later, what's changed, and what the future might hold for producers of open source software. From a Strange Loop keynote, September 30 2017. (Video of talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS6IpvTWwkQ) FOOTNOTES: Slide 7: https://nolanlawson.com/2017/03/05/what-it-feels-like-to-be-an-open-source-maintainer/ Slide 9: SourceForge stat, The Success of Open Source (book). GitHub stat, https://github.com/blog/2345-celebrating-nine-years-of-github-with-an-anniversary-sale Slide 10: Netscape stat, The Success of Open Source (book). lodash stat, npm. Slide 11: https://peerj.com/preprints/1233.pdf Slide 12: https://www.blackducksoftware.com/about/news-events/releases/78-companies-run-open-source-yet-lack-formal-policies Slide 13: https://opensourcesurvey.org Slide 14: http://www.zdnet.com/article/equifax-blames-open-source-software-for-its-record-breaking-security-breach/ Slide 15: http://marriedtotheseacomics.com/post/103884129802/stop-hitting-yourself-from-married-to-the-sea Slide 25: Headlines: http://www.zdnet.com/article/ballmer-i-may-have-called-linux-a-cancer-but-now-i-love-it/ and https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ Slide 27: https://archive.org/stream/CathedralAndTheBazaar/cathedral-bazaar_djvu.txt Slide 29: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/05/07/the-truth-behind-open-source-apps/ Slide 30: http://npmbynumbers.bocoup.com/ Slide 34: https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/806937150575017984 Slides 36, 37, 38: http://gustavopinto.org/lost+found/saner2016.pdf Slide 44: https://medium.com/@FEhrsam/funding-the-evolution-of-blockchains-87d160988481 Slide 45: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-04-14/this-tech-bubble-is-different Slide 49: https://babeljs.io/blog/2017/09/12/planning-for-7.0

1. Rebuilding the cathedral
@nayafia for Strange Loop 2017

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7. “There’s a perverse effect where, the more successful you
are, the more you get “punished” with GitHub notifications.”
@nolanlawson,
“What it Feels Like to be an Open Source Maintainer”
@nayafia

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What’s going on here?

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SourceForge (2001) GitHub (2017)
Total number of registered users
20M208K

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Netscape browser (1998) lodash (2017)
Downloads in 2 weeks, 20 years apart
21M180K

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2017: Two-thirds of popular projects
have just 1-2 maintainers

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2010 2015
% surveyed companies who say they use open source to
run their business (BlackDuck)
78%42%

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2017: 94% say they use open source at
least sometimes at work
opensourcesurvey.org
* employed respondents

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15. @nayafiaSource: Married to the Sea

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Why do we need maintainers, anyway?

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Maintainers do more than write code
(ex. triage, code review, support,
community management)

18. Maintainers are the “keystone species”
of software development
Maintainers
Users Contributors
@nayafia

19. When maintainers are happy,
everybody benefits
● Secure software
● Software is
easier to use
● Questions
answered
● PRs merged
● Issues answered
● Code reviewed
● Mentorship
Maintainers
Users Contributors
@nayafia

20. Conversely, when they’re
overwhelmed, everybody suffers
Maintainers
Users Contributors● Dead/stagnant
projects
● Less secure
software
● Bad docs
● Questions
unanswered
● Unmerged PRs
● Unanswered
issues
● Contributors
don’t come back
@nayafia

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Maintainers are trying to cope

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Being a maintainer is voluntary, too

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But wait!

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Why aren’t users becoming
contributors?

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Open source is cool now
2001 2016

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The challenge in 2001:
getting people to use open source

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“I think the future of open-source software will
increasingly belong to...people who leave behind the
cathedral and embrace the bazaar.”
Eric Raymond,
“The Cathedral and the Bazaar”

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Open source “won” in a world with
much less information

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93% of npm packages have one maintainer

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Today’s challenge:
scalability of production

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More developers today
(esp. new developers)

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“An observation after having reviewed 10k+ pull requests on
GitHub is that ~80% of contributors doesn't know how to
resolve a merge conflict.”
@sindresorhus

35. @nayafia
Software is getting smaller

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Less than 3% of widely-used projects
are “bazaars”

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1/2 of contributors only contribute
once

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They account for <2% of commits

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Not all contributors want to come back
(and that’s ok!)

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The “2nd time contributor” problem

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Volunteers are not paid staff

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“Adding manpower to a late software
project makes it later” - Brooks’ Law

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What does it cost us to pursue the
wrong strategy?

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Despite being worth over $30bn and $65bn, there are only 15
meaningful contributors to Ethereum and Bitcoin respectively,
and the rate of contribution isn’t going up much with their rise in
popularity.
Fred Ehrsam,
“Funding the Evolution of Blockchains”

45. @nayafia
“The best minds of my generation are
thinking about how to make people click ads.”
Jeff Hammerbacher, Cloudera

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“The best minds of my generation are
thinking about how to make people
click ads.” checking email

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So how do we support maintainers?

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Indirect: Dedicated employer time

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“Shoutout to my team at Behance for allowing me to work on
Babel part-time at work; we’re still basically the only
company working to sustain Babel in any capacity on work
time.”
Henry Zhu,
“Planning for 7.0”

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https://opensourcefriday.com

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Independent: Raise money for open
source work

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github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand

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Infrastructure: Treat open source like
digital infrastructure

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How do we get there?

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“They are annoyed by the noise, and language with
which the discussions are carried on, and feel
themselves placed in a situation in which they are
exposed to insult and ill usage.”
Henry Parnell,
Treatise on Roads

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“...the freest, the easiest, and the least expensive
communication between all the different parts of
the country, which can be done only [with] the best
roads…”
Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations

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...but digital infrastructure is
decentralized and global

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What is the economic value
of open source?

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(This is a brand new world!)

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Open source is an ecosystem

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To survive, it must evolve

64. Thanks!
@nayafia