Enclosed Loops: How open source communities become datasets
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Centralization in code hosting and package management in the 2010s created fundamental shifts in the social arrangements of open source ecosystems. In a regime of centralized open source, platform effects can both empower and detract from communities depending on underlying technical implementations and governance mechanisms. In this paper we examine Dependabot, Crater and Copilot as three nascent tools whose existence is predicated on centralized software at scale. Open source ecosystems are maintained by positive feedback loops between community members and their outputs. This mechanism is guided by community standards that foreground notions of accountability and transparency. On one hand, software at scale supports positive feedback loops of exchange among ecosystem stakeholders: community members (developers), users, and projects. On the other, software at scale becomes a commodity to be leveraged and expropriated. We perform a comparative analysis of attributes across the three tools and evaluate their goals, values, and norms. We investigate these feedback loops and their sociotechnical effects on open source communities. We demonstrate how the values embedded in each case study may diverge from the foundational ethos of open communities as they are motivated by, and respond to the platform effects, corporate capture, and centralization of open source infrastructure. Our analysis finds that these tools embed values that are reflective of different modes of development - some are transparent and accountable, and others are not. In doing so, certain tools may have feedback mechanisms that extend communities. Others threaten and damage communities ability to reproduce themselves.
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