A 2020 book by nadia-eghbal (writing as Nadia Eghbal Asparouhova), published by Stripe Press. It extends and deepens the analysis of Eghbal's earlier roads-and-bridges-2016 report, moving from the infrastructure-funding problem to a structural analysis of how open source projects actually function and why maintenance is chronically undersupported.
Argument
Eghbal's central move is to reframe open source through the lens of the creator economy rather than traditional commons theory. She argues that most open source projects do not function like Wikipedia (a community-produced commons) but like one-to-many media — a creator produces work that many consumers use passively, with a small "inner circle" of active contributors and a larger periphery of users who treat the software as a product rather than a shared project.
This reframing has important implications for sustainability. If open source projects are more like media than commons, the solutions appropriate to commons (governance reform, contribution norms, rotational maintenance) may be less useful than solutions appropriate to media (patronage, sponsorship, platform support). The GitHub Sponsors model reflects this creator-economy logic.
The book also examines how platforms — particularly github-platform — have transformed the dynamics of open source contribution. GitHub lowered the cost of contribution so dramatically that the bottleneck shifted from "how do we get patches" to "how do maintainers manage the volume of low-quality contributions, demands, and support requests." The result is that popularity can become a burden rather than a resource.
Significance
Where roads-and-bridges-2016 established the infrastructure framing for the maintainer-sustainability-crisis, "Working in Public" provided the structural analysis. Together they represent the most substantive engagement with FOSS sustainability in the modern-foss-and-sustainability-crisis-2015-present era.
The book is unusual in the FOSS literature for engaging seriously with the economics and incentive structures of open source work without assuming that better governance or cultural norms will solve the problem. Eghbal takes the structural issues seriously: the combination of near-zero-cost copying, infinite demand, and the platform dynamics of github-platform creates pressures that individual maintainers cannot resolve through better community management.
The creator-economy parallel is provocative but contested — critics note that software is not media and that the public-good character of critical infrastructure creates obligations that the creator-audience model does not address. The debate it opens is more valuable than any specific conclusion.