Reread this after eight months of half-building a thing in public. Eghbal’s central observation — that open-source production has fragmented into clubs of one maintainer surrounded by drive-by users — lands harder when you’re the one maintainer.
What she underplays: the visibility of work-in-progress is increasingly its own product. The way Bartosz Ciechanowski draws traffic; the way a half-finished consequence-chain site (this one) accidentally serves as a calling card. The economic story is one frame; the reputational story is another, and they don’t track.
The chapter on stewardship is the one I keep returning to. Whether you want it or not, anything you publish under your name acquires a maintenance burden the day the first stranger uses it. The choice is which burdens to invite. I haven’t seen a clear thinker write about this except her.