Open source culture and the valorization of public work
Chris's Wiki :: blog/tech/OpenSourceCultureAndPublicWork
Open source culture and the valorization of public work

	February 25, 2024
A while back I wrote about how doing work that scales requires
being able to scale your work, which
in the open source world requires time, energy, and the willingness
to engage in the public sphere of open source regardless of the
other people there and your reception. Not everyone has this sort
of time and energy, and not everyone gets a positive reception by
open source projects even if they have it.

This view runs deep in open source culture, which valorizes public
work even at the cost of stress and time. Open source culture on
the one hand tacitly assumes that everyone has those available, and
on the other hand assumes that if you don't do public work (for
whatever reason) that you are less virtuous or not virtuous at all.
To be a virtuous person in open source is to contribute publicly
at the cost of your time, energy, stress, and perhaps money, and
to not do so is to not be virtuous (sometimes this is phrased as
'not being dedicated enough').

(Often the most virtuous public contribution is 'code', so people who
don't program are already intrinsically not entirely virtuous and lesser
no matter what they do.)

Open source culture has some reason to praise and value 'doing work
that scales', public work; if this work does not get done, nothing
happens. But it also has a tendency to demand that everyone do it and
to judge them harshly when they don't. This is the meta-cultural issue
behind things like the cultural expectations that people will file bug
reports, often no matter what the bug
reporting environment is like or if filing bug reports does any good
(cf).

I feel that this view is dangerous for various reasons, including
because it blinds people to other explanations for a lack of public
contributions. If you can say 'people are not contributing because
they're not virtuous' (or not dedicated, or not serious), then you
don't have to take a cold, hard look at what else might be getting
in the way of contributions. Sometimes such a cold hard look might
turn up rather uncomfortable things to think about.

(Not every project wants or can handle contributions, because they
generally require work from existing project members. But not all
such projects will admit up front in the open that they either don't
want contributions at all or they gatekeep contributions heavily
to reduce time burdens on existing project members. And part of
that is probably because openly refusing contributions is in itself
often seen as 'non-virtuous' in open source culture.)
