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Open-source software (OSS) sits at the center of almost every digital technology moving the world since the early 1980s—laptops, cellphones, widespread internet connectivity, cloud computing, social media, automation, all the rainbow flavors of e-commerce, and even secure communications and anti-censorship tools.
Hi, welcome to your Weekend!With apologies to next month’s annual Hallmark holiday, the theme of this weekend’s issue is love. Annie writes about a well-connected founder building an audio platform for better self-love. Malique talks to sneakerheads about their love of fresh Nikes and Adidas, ...
Tobias Koppers doesn’t work for Instagram. He never has. But since 2014 he’s been responsible for maintaining an important component of the web version of Instagram. Koppers is the creator of webpack, an open source code bundling tool for JavaScript. Basically, webpack enables code splitting, allowing developers to optimize their JavaScript code and split it up into smaller chunks so that when you visit a web application, the most important pieces of code download first. This makes web applications faster because you don’t have to download the entire application before you can start usi...
Funding for OSS projects is typically dire. In 2019, developer André Staltz collected data from Open Collective and GitHub to assess project revenues. Over 50 per cent of projects couldn't sustain their maintainers above the poverty line, while 31 per cent generated enough for a salary considered unacceptable in the industry. The sample size was small (58), but that made these results even more illuminating. It comprised relatively large projects, most with at least one full-time contributor. For each of these, there are thousands of other projects that are smaller, but still critical for at...
Nadia Eghbal’s new book, Working In Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, may not have been on your short list of books to read this year. It’s admittedly a nerdy topic: it’s about open source projects, roles and responsibilities; the rise of GitHub as a developer platform; and how developer culture is evolving around the new power of creator platforms. I recommend you get it. It is mostly about software development, but the core insight of the book is bigger: Eghbal clearly sees and articulates something important about the way we make things, and how that’s...