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.
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4 of Nadia Asparouhova's claims fit 4 mental models. Most often: Collective action problems, Second-order thinking, Trade-offs.
What everyone would gain from, nobody provides alone, so shared goods need someone or something to hold people together.
Their wordsMost users don’t actually impose costs back to maintainers: they download the code and never interact with the project.
Ask "and then what?": follow a decision past its first effect to the ones that come after.
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.
Every choice gives something up, so name the cost; and check, because some trade-offs everyone assumes are not real.
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.
When something becomes cheap and plentiful, the value moves to whatever is still rare next to it.
Their wordsWhile everyone is focused on putting up tollbooths, opportunities to “price” maintainer attention, and access to maintainers, remain undervalued.