Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Modern Open Source Software
Eghbal's book is the most important work on open source published in the last decade.
She argues that GitHub fundamentally changed the economics of open source by making contribution frictionless while leaving maintenance costs untouched, creating an asymmetry that burns out maintainers.
The book introduces a taxonomy of open-source communities — federations, clubs, toys, and stadiums — based on contributor growth versus user growth, replacing the romantic image of the bazaar with a more realistic map.
Eghbal draws on research into online communities, public goods economics, and her own extensive interviews with maintainers to show that the crisis of open source is structural, not motivational.
The analysis extends naturally to any platform where creators produce for an audience they cannot control.
For product leaders who depend on open-source infrastructure — which is nearly all of them — this book explains why the foundations beneath your product are more fragile than they appear.
Central argument
Eghbal argues that GitHub's lowering of contribution barriers created a structural asymmetry in open source: the cost of attracting users and one-off contributors dropped to near zero, while the cost of maintaining software remained entirely on a small group of core maintainers. To map this dynamic, she introduces a four-part taxonomy — federations, clubs, toys, and stadiums — where stadiums, characterized by massive user bases and tiny contributor pools, have become the dominant and most precarious form. The crisis in open source is therefore not a failure of community spirit but a predictable consequence of platform economics applied to public goods.
Critique
Eghbal's analysis is sharp on diagnosis but thin on remedies — the book largely stops at describing the structural trap rather than evaluating which interventions, from GitHub Sponsors to corporate stewardship models, might actually rebalance the economics at scale. More critically, her framework is built almost entirely around individual maintainers of widely-adopted libraries in the JavaScript and systems programming ecosystems, which may not generalize cleanly to open-source projects embedded within large institutions, government, or academia where motivations and failure modes differ substantially. A reader looking for a theory of change, not just a theory of collapse, will close the book somewhat stranded.
Why it matters for product
Product leaders who treat open-source dependencies as free infrastructure are carrying hidden organizational debt: as Eghbal's stadium model shows, the libraries most critical to your stack are often maintained by the fewest people under the most asymmetric pressure, making supply-chain risk a product strategy problem, not just a security one. Her framework also has direct application to any platform product where the team designs for contributors but scales toward passive consumers — the same dynamics that burn out open-source maintainers can erode creator motivation on internal tools, developer platforms, or community-driven features if the economics of recognition and maintenance are left unaddressed.