Contributions make open source what it is, clearly. Codebases that languish unloved and unmaintained are a sad thing, but these days, there is a generally positive aura across open source as contribution friction drops and maintainers have to adapt to new (usually positive, but not always) trust signals when analyzing pull requests.
We’re now at a point where the open code community is experiencing a phenomenon dubbed the “Eternal September” effect.
What is Eternal September?
Something of a misnomer (Eternal Spring would have been more appropriate), September is a reference to the influx of new university students who would arrive online every autumn/fall season. Because every user would request onboarding to Usenet, the global distributed discussion platform popularized in the early 1990s, the Eternal September online is cast in stone as a hubbub of activity and engagement.
Ashley Wolf, director for open source programs at GitHub, says that the Eternal September currently defining open source is down to sheer volume of contributions, partly due to the falling “cost” (in terms of research effort) of contributions.
“In the era of mailing lists, contributing to open source required real effort. You had to subscribe, lurk, understand the culture, format a patch correctly, then explain why it mattered. The effort didn’t guarantee quality, but it filtered for engagement. Most contributions came from someone who had genuinely engaged with the project.
It also excluded people. The barrier to entry was high. Many projects worked hard to lower it in order to make open source more welcoming,” explained Wolf, writing on the GitHub blog.
So have things gotten better, or worse, or better but with some worsening consequences? It kind of feels like all three… and it all comes down to the friction factor.
Smoother Friction Factors?
Over the years, the GitHub team has worked to refine the friction factor and put “Good First Issues” labels on pull requests, a move designed to grow communities and make contributions more accessible. But friction in the sense we’re using it here can be a good thing or a bad thing, i.e., too much keeps users (and their ideas) out, too little friction can strain the trust that open source depends on.
Today, Wolf reminds us that a pull request can be generated in seconds. This reality is amplified by the fact that generative AI makes it easy for software developers to produce code, issues, or security reports in large quantities. The cost to create has dropped, but the cost to review has not, lamented Wolf, who also says that she understands that most contributors do act in good faith and are motivated by learning.
“The challenge is what happens when low-quality contributions arrive at scale. When volume accelerates faster than review capacity, even well-intentioned submissions can overwhelm maintainers. When that happens, trust, the foundation of open collaboration, starts to strain,” she noted.
The answer to this seasonally-spiced coding conundrum at GitHub is grounded in upholding maintainer sustainability. The team wants to offer immediate relief in the here and now, while also building toward longer-term, systemic improvements. Part of the answer lies in tooling, and part of it is down to creating clearer signals so maintainers can decide where to spend their time so they don’t get left out in the cold of winter.
New Tools From GitHub
In terms of new functions and tools, Wolf and the GitHub team have pointed to Pinned comments on issues, a feature that allows users to pin a comment to the top of an issue from the comment menu. New banners designed to reduce comment noise have been introduced so that maintainers can experience fewer unnecessary notifications. A new banner encourages people to react or subscribe, instead of leaving noise like “+1” or “same here” as is often the case.
Other new services include pull request performance improvements i.e. pull request diffs (a term which shows the nature of exact changes i.e. additions, deletions and modifications between a source branch (a developer’s own work) and a target branch (e.g. the main codebase), which have been optimized for greater responsiveness and large pull requests in the new files changed experience respond up to 67% faster.
Easier bug triage is also possible thanks to improved speeds when browsing and navigating issues as a maintainer. There are also temporary interaction limits for maintainers to temporarily enforce a period of limited activity for certain users on a public repository.
Remember the Early Internet?
“Open source’s Eternal September is a sign of something worth celebrating: More people want to participate than ever before. The volume of contributions is only going to grow – and that’s a good thing. But just as the early Internet evolved its norms and tools to sustain community at scale, open source needs to do the same. Not by raising the drawbridge, but by giving maintainers better signals, better tools and better ways to channel all that energy into work that moves their projects forward,” added Wolf, with a note of positivity.
It seems clear that GitHub knows there is no single correct solution. That’s why it is watching to see maintainers building tools that match their project’s specific values. The tools communities build around the platform often become the proving ground for what might eventually become features.
Above all, the GitHub team reassures us that they understand walls don’t build communities. As GitHub explores next steps, its focus is on giving maintainers more control while helping protect what makes open source communities work.
