To me, this seems to be taking an unrsalistic definition of "collaborate" and then being surprised that nobody meets it.
Is there any other venue where the author's definition of "collaborate" rings true? If your definition of collaborate is everyone works equally on everything as if by committee - no large project works that way. Neither do most small projects.
His definition is what you would expect in most work settings.
For example, on a team of 5 individual contributors who were supposed to be peers, were paid the same, etc, if one of them was doing 80% of the work, most people would think something was wrong there.
It would be surprising if someone that high-performing weren't promoted into a different role. My claim isn't that such differences don't exist among people... only that we don't say such a group is "collaborating", which (to me) typically connotes some roughly equal breakdown of work. We say that the group has a leader, or that it is "A's project, but X, Y, and Z are helping a little."
The OP's thesis is that the rhetoric around "tens of millions of people collaborating to produce OSS" is misleading, and I think his point is fair. Most people would be surprised to see how single-individual-heavy the actual production is.
I don't think anyone uses collaborating to mean "collaborating equally".
The idea that "tens of millions of people collaborating [exactly equally] to produce OSS" is so obviously not true, its hard to imagine anyone seriously believes that.
That doesn’t sound out of the ordinary. You’d expect them to get promoted, a large raise or switch to a better (paying) company but those kinds of differences in performance sound normal.
In a work setting not everyone is paid the same and not everyone provides the same value. In open source, people aren't paid, which isn't equivalent to being paid "equally". Some do more than others.
I feel like in a work setting, the equivalent would be saying it is not collaborative because senior employees are more productive than the interns.
In my prior job, I worked at a company that had a large monorepo with thousands of engineers contributing to it every week. I truly felt like I was part of a mass collaboration of people that were collectively defining what our product should be like and how it should operate.
The point of the article was that this is not happening through collaboration. If I import a library you wrote in my project, I am not "collaborating" with you. And out of the hundreds of libraries that a typical project uses today, the project authors are unlikely to even report bugs in more than a handful. Contributing core features to even one of them (which would count as collaboration) is unlikely, and doing so for more than 2-3 is basically unheard of.
This is not an indictment of the actual FOSS model. It's just an indictment of the use of the word "mass collaboration" to refer to it.
The point is that the vast majority of projects are built by a small team, with very small contributions from a larger cloud of devs.
Exceptions are things like Linux or Kubernetes, where many teams from many places actually form a loose organization that actively collaborates on the project as a whole. Of course, even there it's not like a fully connected graph, but it's more like a typical software org, with different teams focusing on different areas of the code base, but team leads coordinating with other team leads at various levels, and all following a somewhat common vision.
Before the invention of cities and companies, there was hardly any cooperation besides hunting together.
>(1) After playing this for 3 years, I’ve learned that you have to learn about your team mates styles, and this can only happen if you consistently play with the same folks.
There are TikTok algorithms to find content that people like. It should be equally possible to find teammates that are fun to play with.
The difference is that a teammate algorithm stops being useful once it is successful thus it is difficult to monetize.
I was hoping for some interesting analysis of how big projects like wikipedia and iNaturalist are often dominated by the contributions of surprisingly few individuals. Unfortunately this just seems to be thought piece about definitions washing up on the rocks of reality.
Is there any other venue where the author's definition of "collaborate" rings true? If your definition of collaborate is everyone works equally on everything as if by committee - no large project works that way. Neither do most small projects.