Open-source infrastructure
The software everything else is built on, maintained by people who are usually not paid for it. Apply the seven rows and six of them fit — the seventh is where the frame breaks, and that is the finding.
- Place
- No single place, Global · position on the map is a convention
- Founded
- 1983–1998
- Status
- Contested
- Duration
- c. 43 years and counting
What is held
Maintained software that other software depends on — the libraries, runtimes, compilers and protocol implementations that most systems in the economy link against and almost none of them pay for.
Who is in
Anyone may use it — that is the licence. Anyone may contribute — that is the repository. Almost nobody does, and the ratio between the two is the entire problem this page is about.
Who decides
The maintainers, and usually very few of them. Governance runs from a foundation with a written charter and a board, down to one person with commit rights, no successor and no plan.
How the rules are made
The project's governance document where one exists, and the maintainers' practice where one does not. The licence is the only genuinely fixed rule, and it is chosen once, at the start, usually by one person who was not thinking about this.
How cheating is caught
Public by construction: every change is a diff with an author's name on it, reviewable by anyone, permanently. What is not monitored is whether anyone is still maintaining — a project can look healthy and be one exhausted person.
The sanction ladder
- A review that declines the change
- Loss of commit rights
- Code-of-conduct enforcement — warning, then temporary ban
- A fork — the commons splits, rather than the member leaving
4 rungs, in order of escalation, for Open-source infrastructure.
What happens in a bad year
The maintainer stops. There is no allocation to cut and no rota to tighten, because the resource does not become scarce — it becomes unmaintained, and that shows up months later as an unpatched vulnerability in everything downstream.
Notes on the account
This page is an experiment run in public: take the frame that describes a Swiss alp and a Valencian canal, apply it to a digital commons, and print where it breaks instead of forcing it.
Six rows fit better than they have any right to. Boundaries, offices, rulemaking, monitoring and a graduated sanction ladder are all there, and the ladder even has a rung the physical commons do not: the fork. When a dispute becomes irreconcilable, the resource itself is copied and split, and both halves carry on. Nowhere in this gallery can a village take its alp with it.
Row seven is where it breaks. Every other arrangement here has a bad year in which a shared thing becomes scarce and has to be divided. Software is not rivalrous — a million more users consume none of it. The scarce resource is the maintainer’s attention, and it is not held in common at all. It is one person’s, and when it runs out nothing visibly changes until something downstream fails.
That is a real finding about the limits of the frame, and it belongs on the page rather than being smoothed over.
What is not settled in this draft
Which project the rows are describing. “Open-source infrastructure” is a family, not an arrangement, and generalising across a foundation-governed project and a one-maintainer library may be the flaw that makes this page wrong rather than interesting. HC-011 is asked whether the mapping holds — and where it breaks is the part worth printing.
The glyph’s position on the map is a convention. This arrangement is not in the mid-Atlantic; it is not anywhere.
How to start one — Becoming a maintainer
- What it takes
- Showing up more than once. Every governance document in this space describes a path from contributor to committer to maintainer, and in practice the path is sustained, unglamorous review and triage rather than large contributions. For a project with a foundation, there is a written process; for a project with one maintainer, there is a person who has to decide to trust you.
- What it costs
- Unpaid time, indefinitely, with an obligation that does not pause. The cost most maintainers report is not the work — it is that the work has no natural end and that stopping feels like a failure owed to people who did not pay for anything.
- The legal form
- Usually none for the individual. The project may sit under a fiscal host or a foundation that holds the trademark and the funds; the code itself is governed by its licence, and the licence is a contract with the world that no assembly can amend after the fact.
- What usually goes wrong in year two
- Burnout, and specifically the discovery that the demands scale with users while the help does not. The second is succession: a project with one maintainer and no named successor is one life event away from being unmaintained, and almost nobody writes that plan down before they need it.
Not yet checked by a practitioner
Sources
- Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure — Nadia Eghbal, Ford Foundation, 2016.
- Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software — Nadia Eghbal, Stripe Press, 2020.
- Governing Knowledge Commons — ed. Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison and Katherine J. Strandburg, Oxford University Press, 2014.