I've been reading [[Nadia Eghbal]]'s book, [[book:Working in Public]] and it's fascinating. Initially, I felt intimidated by the title.

Was it going to be boring? What can I even get out of it?

Once i got past those and just started reading. Word by word, little by little, I became increasingly intrigued. The past few days, the book has been my nightly respite from work. I lay in my bed and read it.

My thoughts?

Open Source's History is amazing

Starting from the free software movement, it evolved into what we know as Open Source today. It's interesting how Github made a bet on Git and overtook Sourceforge as the go-to place for open source. As history tells it, sourceforge was slow to adopt git and support git-based projects.

Github as a Platform

This particular part caught my attention. Initially, Github started out as a more convenient way to contribute to open source. They did so by focusing on developer workflow – imagine being able to edit files from Github itself and opening a Pull Request (PR) with a click of a button.

As they attracted more people to the platform, it was easier for developers to discover new projects by way of the "star" feature. They also made it easier to add open source licenses to projects despite it not being entirely aligned with the values of Open Source. Convenience simply mattered more to developers.