Yochai Benkler

Foreword

By Edo Segal

I remember the exact moment I understood what Benkler was really saying.

It was 2019, maybe early 2020. I was sitting in a room with a dozen engineers trying to figure out why our open-source contributors had stopped contributing. The project wasn't dead — it was useful, it was well-maintained, it had momentum. But the pull requests had slowed to a trickle. People were drifting away. And I couldn't figure out why, because everything Benkler had described — the modularity, the granularity, the low-cost integration — was all still there. The architecture was right. The community norms were healthy. The cost of participation was low. So where did everyone go?

They went to work. Not on our project, not on anyone's project — they went back inside firms.