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The Long Tail of Open Source - Hacker Paradise

The Long Tail of Open Source - Hacker Paradise

A small talk I gave about the motivations and disillusions of maintaining a small and heavily used package. I talked about the "Long Tail" in contrast to projects like the Linux Kernel or CPython and the various support models that some open source software is adopting.

Josh Schneier

February 17, 2017
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  1. Me • Poker Player • Various jobs including running a

    consultancy • Started programming in college • Hacker School (now Recurse Center) • Quit fairly recently (< 6 months) • Consulting part-time fullstack / APIs mostly • Focusing on self-improvement, open source, and personal projects
  2. Me in Open Source • First contribution to Mozilla’s mozillians

    • Numerous contributions to urllib3 • Smaller fixes in many other well-known and lesser-known projects: requests, pip, fastlane, Django, Twisted etc • Most fixes are for bugs I hit when working, some are not • Was never in the position of “maintainer” until I acquired 
 django-storages
  3. Big Open Source • Linux / Open BSD • Python

    / Ruby • Bash • GCC / LLVM • Postgresql • Apache project • Git • Docker • Firefox • Google Chrome • Android • too many to list… The famous projects that we all know
  4. Big Open Source • These projects are infrastructure Good infrastructure

    is invisible • There are usually deep corporate interests built on these projects • They give resources - developer time as well as money for new features • Something like OpenSSL and PGP seem like counterexamples
  5. What about the rest? • Litany of dependencies for standard

    web applications in my experience • Who are the maintainers and what are their motivations The Long Tail of Open Source
  6. My Perspective (Background) • Maintain a package called
 django-storages •

    A package that plugs into the Django ecosystem • Decently popular - in the top 300 packages on PyPI • Completely abandoned by its creator in March of 2014 • I forked in December 2014, became official successor in February 2016
  7. Benefits of Maintaining • Ego • Contacted by companies looking

    to hire • Nice to give back, goes back to ego • Fits very nicely into my ideals • But oh so many drawbacks…
  8. The Shame of Open Source • Open source is hard

    • Volunteering free time, hard to find sometimes • Totally understand people getting frustrated • Constantly feel ashamed • Half the time I just delete emails about new issues and pull requests • Extremely concious of not breaking backwards compat - people are running businesses on top of this software • Uncompensated
  9. Future Research / Sustainability • Would like to contact the

    maintainers of the top ~500 or so Python projects and hear their stories • Saw a talk by the founder of Gratipay / Gittip at an NYC meetup • Jazzband • vuejs • djangorestframework • Sentry et al • Sidekiq