Rebuilding the cathedral
@nayafia for Strange Loop 2017

@nayafia

@nayafia

@nayafia

@nayafia

@nayafia

“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

@nayafia
What’s going on here?

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

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

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

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

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

@nayafia

@nayafiaSource: Married to the Sea

@nayafia
Why do we need maintainers, anyway?

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

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

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

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

@nayafia
Maintainers are trying to cope

@nayafia
Being a maintainer is voluntary, too

@nayafia
But wait!

@nayafia
Why aren’t users becoming
contributors?

@nayafia
Open source is cool now
2001 2016

@nayafia
The challenge in 2001:
getting people to use open source

@nayafia
“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”

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

@nayafia

@nayafia
93% of npm packages have one maintainer

@nayafia
Today’s challenge:
scalability of production

@nayafia

@nayafia
More developers today
(esp. new developers)

@nayafia
“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

@nayafia
Software is getting smaller

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

@nayafia
1/2 of contributors only contribute
once

@nayafia
They account for <2% of commits

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

@nayafia
The “2nd time contributor” problem

@nayafia
Volunteers are not paid staff

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

@nayafia
What does it cost us to pursue the
wrong strategy?

@nayafia
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”

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

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

@nayafia
So how do we support maintainers?

@nayafia
Indirect: Dedicated employer time

@nayafia
“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”

@nayafia
https://opensourcefriday.com

@nayafia
Independent: Raise money for open
source work

@nayafia

@nayafia

@nayafia
github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand

@nayafia
Infrastructure: Treat open source like
digital infrastructure

@nayafia
How do we get there?

@nayafia
“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

@nayafia
“...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

@nayafia
...but digital infrastructure is
decentralized and global

@nayafia
What is the economic value
of open source?

@nayafia
(This is a brand new world!)

@nayafia
Open source is an ecosystem

@nayafia
To survive, it must evolve

Thanks!
@nayafia