Making is show business now (2020)
&gt; Something important changed between the 90s and today. If you look at most open source projects now, the distribution of who’s doing the work versus who’s simply there is skewed dramatically: it’s common to see projects where 95% of the work is done by a nucleus of people, perhaps even a single developer, with a long tail of “contributors”<p>Any evidence this has actually changed between the 90s and now?<p>I have a strong suspicion that it&#x27;s always been this way.<p>There are exceptional projects where the work is more distributed (is Linux an example?), but my suspicion is that they were exceptional in the 90s and still are, and that all along most projects have this &quot;dramatic skew&quot; as described.<p>For software of now, you can look at github. For software of the 90s, 2000s... I wonder if anyone has tried to research this?<p>I definitely don&#x27;t see any reason to assume it was different without evidence.