When we talk about “The Commons” in the context of open source, and when we talk of preserving it, we’re alway thinking of the source code itself.

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But open source code isn’t a scarce resource.

It’s the exact opposite, actually: it’s infinitely reproducible at zero cost to the user and to the ecosystem.

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So contrary to traditional resources which can be exhausted when overused, that can’t happen to a commons of digital assets.

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A lot of the way we think about the world comes from a place of scarcity. But in the digital world, scarcity doesn’t exist any longer.

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We’ve been able to maintain scarcity artificially for economical reasons, through copyright law, for example, but open source breaks down that last barrier too.

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Using open source code doesn’t prevent someone else from using it too.

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Using open source code doesn’t ever deplete the source code repository. It’s always there, ready to be cloned, at no cost.

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So why is it that we’re still inclined to think of open source with the same set of concerns that we use to consider a fragile ecosystem whose resources are at risk of being depleted?

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Well, it’s precisely this ability of open source code to be reproducible infinitely and at no cost which puts the system at risk.

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Without revenue, there is no maintenance, and without maintenance, the commons becomes toxic very quickly.

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Why is that? Because the ecosystem changes at a rapid pace.

As new paradigms are invented, reliance on older open source assets becomes a liability that prevents you from adapting quickly to changes in your business.

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As new security issues are discovered, open source code that isn’t updated becomes a security risk.

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So contrary to more traditional ecosystem we can think of, such as a lake, for example, which auto-regulate in the absence of human intervention, and where the principal risk to the ecosystem is precisely the human intervention itself, open source code is very different.

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The open source commons supplies are infinite, and the commons deteriorates instead of flourishes at the lack of human intervention.

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Yet, we see it as a common.

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There’s only one explanation to this.

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In open source, the maintainers working on the source code are the scarce resource that needs to be protected and nurtured.

The community is the commons.

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Think about it. It makes perfect sense. If you abuse the community around the source code, overuse it and exhaust it, people leave. And your system deteriorates until you course correct.

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In an ecosystem with finite resources, the attention is required to be on the resources themselves, to avoid depleting them.

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In an ecosystem with infinite resources, the attention needs to be on the people taking care of and maintaining that resource, because that’s where the bottleneck is.

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Apache’s “People over code” comes to mind very literally in that context.

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So we’re right to think about open source as a commons. We’re just wrong to think of code as the scarce resource. That’s the community around the code. That’s the one you need to nurture and preserve.

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