Many of these contradictions start with the puzzling fact that open source communities, despite their intensely and aggressively egalitarian rhetoric, exhibit extreme inequalities in the contributions being made and/or being welcomed by self-reported members of the community.
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Most language communities have a sharp divide between language users and language developers. The divide is even sharper if you insist that "language developer" means "makes one or more contributions to the core language repo" rather than authoring packages or libraries.
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Most users do not contribute to any popular packages or libraries. Of those few who do, few of them also contribute to the core language repo.
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Even among contributors to the core repo, the contributions mostly come from a small number of highly engaged core developers. Check the commit logs for Julia, Rust, Python, Ruby to see this inequality in effect. It's quite striking.
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Links for those who want to see for themselves: * Python: https://github.com/python/cpython/graphs/contributors … * Julia: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/graphs/contributors … * Rust: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors … * Ruby: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/graphs/contributors …
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This inequality in contributions by itself is probably sufficient to introduce most of the other pathologies I've seen in OSS communities since it is both caused by and causes profound differences in the daily experiences of end users, package developers and language developers.
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One clear effect of this massive inequality in contributions is that it creates the infamous OSS burnout problems many OSS communities are struggling to prevent since all of the work ends up being done by a very small group of people who aren't well compensated for their work.
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In large part, burnout reflects a funny quirk of existing OSS incentive structures; as the number of users increases, the workload increases without any compensating increasing in the pool of funds for paying for that work to get done. It's the dark side of the power of free.
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This example particularly amuses me because it's a novel problem introduced by OSS that wasn't present with traditional closed source, pay for software. In those earlier settings, the pool of funds to pay for development generally grew linearly with the number of users.
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At the same time that the incentive structures for OSS projects can end up screwing over developers, they can also end up screwing over users; hence the original thread. Users who aren't hobbyist language developers often want things that core developers don't enjoy working on.
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Getting multiple developers to coordinate around a single design is really hard anywhere; it's especially hard for OSS projects since one of the most liberating parts of creating an OSS project is that you yourself get to decide on the core principles for your project.
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Losing that autonomy without any clear compensation is a tough pill to swallow. We're very luck as a society we have anyone who's willing to do the crappier parts of OSS development on projects for which they don't get the fame or credit. But it's luck -- and can't be relied upon
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Before I close out, I'll note that the funniest contradiction of OSS projects is that one of the original motivations -- users should have the ability to read and modify the source code of programs they use -- turns out to be a good that isn't in very high demand.
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