The Mismeasure of Open Source: https://nesbitt.io/2026/05/09/the-mismeasure-of-open-source.html
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@andrewnez The number of people who understand this is an extremely small number
My poster child for this is
https://github.com/ossf/tac/issues/101
It's filled with opinions that don't change even when shown the data. Those are the same people that then built scorecard
@joshbressers @andrewnez thanks for helping me understand one of my biggest frustrations - after spending a certain number of years in open source, sometimes it's hard to see that the number of people understanding these caveats is small
@mainec @joshbressers I wonder how many of the multi-maintainer projects mentioned in that thread have dependencies on single maintainer packages
@andrewnez Great read, thanks for writing it!
It reminded me partly of this:
https://indieweb.social/@tg/116522563497941266, without the nostalgia; the analogy being, I think, that we tend to get metrics for "platform-like" packages that are seen and used by the person in front of the screen, while the "boring" infrastructure bits are missed cos they don't (need to) follow every wave of "disruption"? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@andrewnez one fun metric we can use to show the alternative funding source you talk about at the end is that the number 1 reason project goes unmaintained are... The maintainer changed employer. We have relatively good data on this.
@andrewnez
My small corner of academic software has the same issues. You can have three popular software packages in the same subfield. One is maintained by a PI who gets a grant to work on it part time with their trainees; one is run by a postdoc in their free time; one was written by a grad student for a paper and the student disappeared the moment the paper was published, never to touch the code again.
And that is not visible anywhere.
