Reread this after eight months of building something in public. Eghbal’s central observation — that open-source production has shifted toward a single maintainer surrounded by drive-by users — reads differently when you’re the one maintainer.
One thing she underplays: the visibility of work-in-progress is increasingly its own product. Bartosz Ciechanowski’s site draws traffic on that basis; an unfinished consequence-chain site like this one works as a calling card. The economic story and the reputational story are separate, and they don’t track each other.
The chapter on stewardship is the one I keep coming back to. Anything you publish under your name takes on a maintenance burden the day the first stranger uses it. The choice is which burdens to take on. She’s one of the few people I’ve read who writes about this clearly.