Open source community incentives are biased to prefer developers over content creators.

Open source communities are particularly prone to this failure mode. After all, the developers in the community are all doing their work for valid reasons, so why wouldn’t content creators join them? Hot take: the incentives are different.

Open source development is a resume-building value add for the developer. They’re publishing concrete proof of their ability to write working code. In some cases that code even solves interesting problems. In the best cases the developer is proving that they can work in a distributed team.

This effect continues for a dedicated developer writing content, but that developer isn’t always in a good position to write content without the help of customer-facing consultants, engineers, and analysts.

The social reward of providing quality content is not the same for a developer as that for providing quality code. You might think this is driven by a technical difference. Isn’t writing a configuration file or a test file easier than solving an engineering problem in a compiled language?

Well, maybe. For instance, writing content that reliably and optimally finds all of the vulnerable Java engines across an entire organization is far harder than any whiteboard coding test. (Hint one: a JRE doesn’t have to be registered with the operating system in order to operate. Hint two: crawling the file system is very costly. Hint three: you can’t rely on OS indexing features being enabled.)

 Worse, the risk level is higher for the developer writing content: the content is an incomplete starting point, the user has to learn more to be successful, and the failure potential is increased. So the developer’s risk-reward ratio is skewed away from writing content and towards writing engines.

What about professional service consultants? Don’t they spend every billable hour writing content? They sure do, and billable is the key word there. They’ll only release their work to open source when it’s no longer a competitive edge: too commonplace or esoteric to be regularly valuable. Again, misaligned incentives blocking open source content.