Unveiling Elite Developers’ Activities in Open Source Projects

> We can conclude that open-source projects are still largely driven by a small number of elite members after over 20 years of evolution. While such high concentrations guarantee the bottom-line project outcomes, it may be not the optimal situation for projects’ long-term health of a project. Engaging the non-elite users’ participation through mechanism and technology innovation is still a challenge.

Oh how naive! Democracy! Egalite! On the contrary, other projects where the leaders went away, clearly show that the race to the bottom line ("bus factor") only destroys a project, and is not able to fulfill the role of the elite developers. The only challenge is to keep the elite developers, not to get more individual contributions. Without efficient leadership it goes downhill.

It would be more interesting to compare the current inefficient businesses practices of a non-technical lead without proper tooling, to the open source practice of the technical lead, with proper tooling.