On one’s own

An analysis drawing on ecosyste.ms data reveals that a large share of #opensource projects are maintained by just one person, for example nearly half of the 13,000 most-downloaded #NPM packages, with this pattern holding for all but the largest download counts. This insight puts a spotlight on the need to carefully think about project and #community health in the modern #software landscape.
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

September 4, 2025

Motivated by an IT security story, Josh Bressers looks into patterns of contributions to open-source software using data from the world’s most comprehensive dataset about open-source production and use, ecosyste.ms. From the article “Open Source is one person”:

About half of the 13,000 most downloaded NPM packages are ONE PERSON. We can change the download number and the graph stays this shape. It’s not until I change downloads to 1 billion downloads that we see 1 package maintained by 1 person, and 9 packages maintained by more than 1.

This is open source. Open source is one person, even the popular stuff.

Food for thought with respect to project health and community sustainability.

I’ll spare you the xkcd.1

Footnotes

  1. It’s 2347.↩︎