Rebuilding the Cathedral
summary
Claim: maintenance does not scale with usage — from ~200,000 users in 2001 to 20 million users today while two-thirds of popular projects have one or two maintainers; npm analysis finds 93% of packages with one maintainer and half of contributors commit only once (under 2% of work). Symptoms: overflowing issues, PRs, coping tactics like templates and company-sponsored time. Concrete fixes proposed: company-paid maintainer time, sponsorships, and treating open source as digital infrastructure (example: a Babel maintainer now spends 50% of work time).
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chapters (41)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:18Open Issues
- 1:30PR
- 1:59Whats taking so long
- 2:29Your contribution
- 2:56Productivity paradox
- 3:22The problem with open source
- 3:47The definition of a popular project
- 4:24The problem with popular projects
- 4:56The problem with big companies
- 5:15GitHub survey
- 6:09Open Source Maintainer
- 6:47Keystone Species
- 7:17Maintainers
- 7:49Coping Strategies
- 8:12Maintaining Projects
- 8:52The Production Model
- 10:41The Bazaar
- 12:24Open Source
- 12:55The Big Question
- 13:12Maintainer X
- 13:32The scary part
- 14:09Fragmenting software
- 16:39Reorienting contributors
- 19:04Casual contributions
- 20:03Too many cooks in the kitchen
- 20:50What does it cost us
- 22:03Jeff Dahmer
- 22:42Empowering Maintainers
- 23:06Encouraging Employees to Work on Open Source
- 23:37Carving Off Work Time
- 23:59Open Source Friday
- 24:13Raising Money
- 24:53Sponsorships
- 26:03Open Source Digital Infrastructure
- 27:13How do we get there
- 27:29Risk and opportunity
- 30:17Open Source is a market
- 30:42An incredible opportunity
- 31:07Think beyond palliative care
- 31:30Opensource needs to evolve
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