Before GitHub, I spent a lot of my time thinking and talking about how to best manage open source projects because the coordination cost of an open source project was significant. So significant, in fact, that when a project did well and grew a big enough community, it made more sense for the project to grow rather than fracture into smaller projects. But the bigger and more complex a software project got, the harder it became to contribute. So an assortment of members — or “committers” — were tasked with managing and producing the project. This often led to rifts between those producing and those consuming a project.
GitHub closed this rift by making open source much more decentralized. It became less about the project and more about the individuals.
#git #github #open-source #décentraliser