@andrewnez This is really insightful. I love the metaphor.

One thing that has changed, since some of the examples you listed, is a bit of a diversification of code repositories. Even though GitHub still has an overwhelming dominance, significant projects are moving to self hosted or codeberg, etc.

I can’t decide whether this is worth acknowledging in the metaphor. Like the repository services are oceans and a whale fall in one might not nourish projects in another. Or a different way to think of it is that how easy it is to fork/collaborate and submit PRs has an impact on how easy it is for the ecosystem to feed on the carcass.

The more I think about it the less important it seems. I think maybe maybe my idea is an irrelevant detail. The fact that someone can pick up the dead project and host its code anywhere is probably sufficient.

This is how I can tell it’s such a good metaphor, though. It provokes lines of thinking and reasoning by exploring the metaphor and mapping back to the real world.

I think this blog post is going to resonate with me a while. Thanks!