Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Highlight

We can return to Spencer Heath MacCallum’s idea of “proprietary communities” to understand what a maintainer does differently from other contributors. MacCallum suggests that a proprietor serves three functions: selection of members, land planning (in the case of open source, “land” is the codebase), and leadership. Member selection and land planning occur whenever maintainers review pull requests from new contributors. They must choose contributors “with a view to their compatibility and complementarity with other members,”143 and they accept contributions based on how they affect the rest of the code.