Working in Public

The author gives an overview of how open source software is written and maintained today, focusing on issues of funding and how to ensure that projects get maintained after the initial production of the code. I found useful the distinction between code as consumption (which is free at marginal cost) and code as production (which is really a quite scarce commodity). I appreciated the collection of ideas on how to improve the situation – in particular the thought of intentionally adding friction, or example by moving away from GitHub to more niche platforms, and requiring payment to open pull requests and issues. Overall, the book was disappointing though. It felt like the focus was unduly on software that is used by other developers as opposed to end users and seemed to really draw on less than twenty people or projects. Political issues, both around the ideology of free software and the interaction of companies seeking to dominate open source projects with the rest of the community also fell by the wayside. The ultimate suggestion – for developers to learn from live streamers – also did not seem very compelling. But I guess I kind of missed a clear statement of what the problem is in the first place anyway.

I've been excited to read this for months. What a disappointment.

This is a good example of what happens when a person hones their long-form writing skills on Twitter threads. This book is a printed Twitter thread.

The first half of the book is an acceptable contemporary survey of the history of Free and Open Source Software. Many important historical details are missed, but Eghbal can be forgiven for this; she isn't a software developer or an industry expert.

The rest of the book, however, is a poorly-researched advertisement for GitHub. Until we reach the final chapter, entitled "Conclusion" despite the fact that no conclusion is reached or even approached, erroneous and misleading statements soak almost every page.

On page 129, Eghbal declares that "Facebook doesn't have a customer support line you can call because they have more than 2 billion monthly active users." Facebook does have a customer support line you can call — if you are a customer. Facebook's customers are advertisers. Facebook's users are inventory. For someone so obsessed with social media, one would expect Eghbal to understand this.

On page 142, she declares "[c]ode by itself is not, and has never been, worth anything, and consumers already know this intuitively when they refuse to directly pay for it." By that same logic, a road or a library also has zero value. The latter half of the book waxes poetic about Club Goods and Public Goods, but it would appear little thought has been given to the semantics of those terms. Worse yet, she doesn't seem to appreciate that code has no analog in the economy which preceded computation. Between mixed metaphors and grand, declarative statements no space has been given to surface original thoughts about the topic at hand.

The tells that announce this deep misunderstanding of open source and its role in the economy are scattered throughout the book. On page 155 we have our first mention of the "Free Rider Problem," which is always a good indication the author has acquired her knowledge of public goods from Wikipedia. Perhaps recently. By the time we get to a comparison of the open source ecosystem to late-90s P2P filesharing systems on page 164, the jig is up. She doesn't understand the topic of her own book.

The writing is poor throughout the book. Nearly every page has a quote on it but, for some reason, the chosen quotes are always full of misspellings, causing Eghbal to shove [sic] into every one. By the tenth instance I had to wonder why her editor didn't suggest correcting all the spelling mistakes and prefixing the book with a caveat. Surely she had an editor? The words which aren't quotes are those of a first draft — a rambling and largely incoherent stream of consciousness broken up with the occasional dull fact or term definition. It was a chore to read.

But I did read it. All the way through to the "conclusion." Eghbal is a fan of scare quotes where they don't belong, such as declaring "clone" to be whimsical GitHub parlance rather than a very specific command of the underlying distributed version control system, but "conclusion" deserves scare quotes. In a book ostensibly about open source software, the final chapter is a stoner's daydream about social media and "content producers" on Facebook. In this final chapter, which doesn't reach any conclusions or formulate a single argument, open source is mentioned once. In a footnote.