Why I think Elon Musk will open up development of the Twitter platform to the public

Welcome to "open source". He'll probably fire the majority of current developers as well.

One of the best things about open source is you invite the world to contribute to your project. This means you and I will be able to write code, submit patches to fix bugs and security vulnerabilities, and propose features to the Twitter team. That sounds amazing, but it’s really no big deal in the software world.

The (I believe) biggest open source project on the interwebs is Linux. In my opinion, Linux is the reason we’re not breaking rocks in a gulag right now, but that’s for another post. I bring up Linux because it’s an example of a massive project that’s been successfully open source for a long time, and I think Musk will do the same with Twitter.

There’s no way Linux could survive and be what it is without contributors from all over the world. If it’s good enough for the Linux project, it’s good enough for Twitter, and Musk knows this.

With an open source project, some rando in flannel pajamas and a cigar hanging out of his mouth, like myself, can “download” the entire code base to their computer. When I say “entire”, that means not only the latest code, but also EVERY SINGLE CHANGE since the beginning of the project. This sounds crazy if you’re not a developer, but that’s how it works. (Even for us developers, that was a mental shift from when the world was migrating to Git from CVS, etc.).

This open contribution system is extremely beneficial because you have a much larger development community chipping in their labor from around the world, for free, than if you had it closed and paying developers for all the work.

What’s the benefit for developers to work for free? When your code changes are accepted, they’re attributed to you, and you can show off that you contributed to a major project like Twitter, which looks good on your resume and to job prospects.

You can tell others that some of your code is running on the largest social media platform in the world, and be able to prove it, since your code will be visible to the public.

It’s also a way to build trust with the core team. When you have a number of contributions under your belt, you may be a good candidate if they need to hire a developer for the core team, since they already know you and are familiar with your work.

It’s a merit-based system, much better than assessing your skin color or where you land on a gender matrix.

Conceptually, it’s very simple. With a project this big, like Linux, your changes go through a few trusted “gatekeepers” before it gets to someone on the core team who would merge it into the code base.

The gatekeepers make sure your changes are good, you adhered to the coding standards (how the core team likes the code to be formatted), and things are well documented. If there’s an issue, they’ll let you know what you did wrong so you can fix it and send it back.

Since the core team is small, once the changes get to them, they shouldn’t have to spend too much time looking over the code. The gatekeepers made sure it’s good and ready to be merged into the code base.

You get exponentially more productivity from this system and spend far less on engineering talent. This is how open source projects work. Another active real-world example of this working for an open social media project is Mastodon (used by Gab and Truth Social).

“But if there’s a lot less development work, they won’t need as many developers!” Exactly. Musk can fire them and keep a much smaller, lightweight efficient group. He’s planning to fire a bunch of dead woke weight, and there’s a reason he was bringing up the bloated, unproductive developer weight:

There’s no need for a all that engineering overhead. Half of them probably don’t even know what gender they are.

I don’t think this would be the immediate path Musk would take, but once he and his smart tech guys get their arms around the platform and begin to nail down the plans for the new architecture, he will.

The biggest benefit to working for Musk, who’s actually involved in the tech world, is you’re in close proximity to the really, really cool stuff. If you impress him and his underlings, maybe you get to work on some space tech, or maybe that new phone he’s building? Working with challenging and innovative tech is a big carrot for engineers.

One final point, for those developers and woke staff who are about to get fired, there is a solution for them HERE.