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Totally anecdotal, but I feel open source projects were much more community oriented in the 90s and the 00s. But after that, it seems they’re either driven by a

• jrochkind1 6y ago
  By "community-oriented", do you mean that the distribution of commits was such that more people were making more commits, instead of "95% of the work is done by a nucleus of people"? I'm not sure if those are the same thing, I'm just talking about the distribution of work.
• gowld 6y ago
  Everything has more "individuals" now, since everyone can get a soapbox/megaphone, from YouTube to GitHub to Twitter to all the rest. And it's possible to monetize that work now, with ads and micro-patrons, which is a huge drain on free and open source, mitigated only (partially) by the increased ability for open sourcerers to collaborate and that nowadays we're drowing in software and don't really need much more new software. You don't need to join a team to get noticed (and on the ugly side, even though having a team helps, it's better for the Personal Brand to make that team invisible)
• nerdponx 6y ago
  Counter-anecdote: most of the small open-source projects I use only have a small number of active contributors because there is a small number of people who actively try to contribute. Projects that stop accepting PRs tend to be pronounced "dead" after just a few months, but there isn't always someone able/willing to fork it and keep the project going. Maybe there are more projects to contribute to than before, so each project gets a smaller % of the "potential contributor" pool.