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"To collaborate on something is to work together with others towards a common goal." Yes, but open source is a power-house of an opportunity to collaborate wit

• dr-detroit 4y ago
• tsimionescu 4y ago
  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.