Nadia Asparouhova
Writer and researcher on open source, author of "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" and, as Nadia Eghbal, of the 2016 Ford Foundation report "Roads and Bridges" on the digital infrastructure the economy runs on. She worked on community programmes at GitHub from 2016 to 2018 and writes at nadia.xyz.
Nadia Asparouhova did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsWith companies, open source developers are selling a product. With individuals, they’re selling themselves.
↗The Twitch argument for GitHub Sponsorsnadia.xyz 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 2 months earlier
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Their wordsAs for my personal feelings on the matter, however, I’m skeptical that new licenses are the right approach on a systemic level, both in terms of feasibility, as well as where I think the world is going.
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Their wordsWhile everyone is focused on putting up tollbooths, opportunities to “price” maintainer attention, and access to maintainers, remain undervalued.
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Their wordsMost users don’t actually impose costs back to maintainers: they download the code and never interact with the project.
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Their wordsIt’s only when users cross over to the production side (ex. report bugs, ask questions, submit patches) that they start to impose costs.
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Their wordsInformation, once freely shared, is a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed again. It is very hard for me to imagine a world where we transition back to paying for access to information; these are pre-digital solutions to modern problems.
- 4 months earlier
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Their wordsThere is nothing about a foundation that is inherently good, neutral, or charitable, simply because they have a 501(c) status.
↗Governance without foundationsnadia.xyz 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsRather, I think that “the foundation”, as a single point of failure, is structurally at odds with the idea of “the project”, which is inherently distributed.
↗Governance without foundationsnadia.xyz 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsOn the other hand, by avoiding foundations, projects also avoid the question of how to formalize their governance, thus risking a “tyranny of structurelessness” that might range from projects living inside a company forever, to disorganized chaos that negatively impacts project velocity.
↗Governance without foundationsnadia.xyz 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 months earlier
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Their wordsThe right to fork is still critical as an implied threat to keep the system in check. But major political forks aren’t as common, and certainly not as top-of-mind, anymore.
↗Do financial incentives increase the threat of forks?nadia.xyz
- 3 weeks earlier
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Their wordsOpen source projects on GitHub represent billions of dollars in value creation, but none of that is captured on GitHub.
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Their wordsSuccessful open source developers get “acquihired” by a company who values their reputation and skills, which has the perverse effect of making them less noisy about how to make a living off of open source.