Working in Public
Why free work costs everything
Description
Almost every piece of software we touch runs, somewhere underneath, on code that nobody was paid to write. The app that tracks a package, the site that processes a payment, the phone that wakes us up — all of it leans on open-source libraries maintained, very often, by one person in their spare time. In 2014, a small encryption tool called OpenSSL was found to have a flaw, later named Heartbleed, that exposed a large share of the secure web. When people went looking for the team behind this critical piece of infrastructure, they found it was kept going by a handful of volunteers and a budget of roughly two thousand dollars a year in donations.
Nadia Eghbal spent years inside this world, first as a researcher and then working at GitHub, the platform where much of modern open source lives. What she found didn't match the story open source likes to tell about itself. The romantic image is a bustling collective, thousands of strangers building something together for the love of it. The reality she documents in "Working in Public" is stranger and lonelier: most projects are carried by very few people, and the biggest problem they face isn't a shortage of contributors. It's the opposite.
That inversion is the puzzle at the center of the book. We assume that free, collaborative work fails because too few people show up. Eghbal argues that success itself is the trap — that becoming popular is precisely what breaks a maintainer. To see why, she stops treating open source as an economy of code and starts treating it as an economy of something scarcer.
The question we’re asking : Why does producing valuable software for free so often exhaust the very people who do it best?What we’ll see : How the collaborative dream of open source quietly became solitary labor, and what that reveals about all creative work done in public.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The myth of the beehive
Open source has a founding story, and like most founding stories it flatters everyone involved. In 1999, the programmer Eric Raymond called it "the cathedral and the bazaar" — the old way of building software was a cathedral, planned by a few architects behind closed doors, while the new way was a bazaar, a noisy marketplace where anyone could pitch in and the sheer number of eyes made every bug shallow. The image stuck because it was hopeful. It suggested that if you opened a project to the world, the world would show up and share the load.
Eghbal's data tells a different story. When she looked at how contributions actually distribute across projects, she found something closer to a spike than a bazaar. On a typical repository, a tiny fraction of people do the overwhelming majority of the work, and everyone else drifts in once, fixes a comma, and vanishes. The pattern holds almost everywhere she looked. The crowd is real, but it doesn't build — it grazes.
02Chapter 2 — When a project becomes a person
The deepest shift Eghbal traces is away from projects and toward people. In the early years, open source was organized around communities — mailing lists, foundations, shared governance, the sense that a project belonged to a group. What platforms like GitHub did, almost as a side effect, was attach code to individual profiles. A repository now sits under a username, with a face and a follower count. The library and the librarian have merged.
This is why she reaches for the language of creators rather than the language of engineering. A popular maintainer starts to resemble a YouTuber or a writer with an audience: the value isn't only in the artifact, it's in the person's ongoing attention and taste. People don't just use the code; they want the maintainer to respond, to approve their contribution, to bless their idea, to keep going. The relationship is parasocial. Thousands feel they know the maintainer. The maintainer knows none of them.
03Chapter 3 — The economics of attention, not code
Once you see maintainers as creators, the funding question changes shape entirely. For years the assumed problem was that open source needed money, and the assumed fix was to route more of it toward projects — corporate sponsorships, foundations, tip jars. Eghbal doesn't dismiss money, but she argues it's aimed at the wrong scarcity. Code is not the bottleneck. The world is drowning in code. What's scarce is a specific person's attention, and attention is far harder to buy than a line item suggests.
This reframes the awkwardness maintainers feel about getting paid. If a company hands a foundation a large check, that's clean; it funds a public good. But when an individual with a face and a following asks strangers to fund their time, it collides with the ideology that made open source feel pure in the first place — the belief that the work was a gift, given freely, outside the market. Money threatens to turn the gift into a transaction, and both sides sense it. Donors start to feel like customers. Maintainers start to feel like they owe.
04Chapter 4 — The cost of a world that runs on volunteers
Open source is the clearest case, but it isn't the only one. Eghbal keeps pulling the frame outward, because the same machinery now governs almost anything made in public online. The internet did something specific and lopsided: it drove the cost of producing and distributing work to nearly zero, while doing nothing to lower the cost of maintaining it. Anyone can publish a library, a video, a thread, a body of writing to a global audience overnight. What no platform solved is who keeps it alive afterward, and at what cost to them.
That gap explains a pattern we now recognize everywhere the digital world touches. The person who builds something useful and free is rewarded with an audience, and the audience arrives as an obligation. The reward and the burden are the same event. This is the shape of the creator's dilemma as much as the maintainer's: visibility is the currency, and visibility is also the thing that eventually crushes you. We have built an entire economy on public generosity while pretending the generosity is costless.
05Conclusion
The maintainers behind Heartbleed weren't negligent, and they weren't unusual. They were the ordinary case, briefly made visible: a handful of people quietly holding up something enormous, on almost nothing, until the moment it broke. Eghbal's achievement in "Working in Public" is to take that image and refuse the easy readings — not a story of underfunding, not a story of ingratitude, but a story about what happens when free production meets endless demand and the two are carried by the same finite person.
