Open Source is one person

Summary

The Register recently published a story titled Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russian dev. They should be ashamed of this story. This poor open source developer is getting beat up now to score some internet points. It’s very upsetting. But anyway, let’s look at some receipts. If you’re not real smrt, it seems like pointing out an open source project is written by one person in a country you don’t like is a bad thing. It could be. But it also could be the software running THE WHOLE F*CKING PLANET is written by one person. In a country. But we have no idea which country. It’s not the same person mind you, but it’s one person. Here’s the thing. Almost all open source is literally one person. What I mean by that is if you look at all the open source projects out there, and there are a lot, we see a pattern of one person no matter how we slice and dice the data. So let’s start with the data. A project exists called ecosyste.ms that catalogs a lot of open source. Most of it I would guess, but not all. They currently have 11.8 million open source projects in their data. You would be right to think that is a big number. I’m told anything over 15 is a big number, but it probably depends how smart you are, or think you are. So what do we mean by one person is open source. What I mean is if we look at all the projects that ecosyste.ms is tracking, how many have a single person maintaining that project? It’s about 7 million. This is also a big number. 7 million open source projects are one person. It’s actually bigger than that, because of the 11.8 million projects ecosyste.ms is tracking, we don’t know how many maintainers 4 million of the projects have. A bunch of those will be one person. Here’s what a graph of this looks like I clipped the graph so it looks nicer. There are projects with hundreds of maintainers. Not a ton, but they exist. Now, the clever people among us are thinking “but Josh, surely these 7 million projects are all things no...