Depending on your politics, trickle-down economics never worked all that well in the United States under President Ronald Reagan. In open source software, however, it seems to be doing just fine.
I’m not really talking about economic policies, of course, but rather about elite software engineering teams releasing code that ends up powering the not-so-elite mainstream. Take Lyft, for example, which released the popular Envoy project. Or Google, which gave the world Kubernetes (though, as I’ve argued, the goal wasn’t charitable niceties, but rather corporate strategy to outflank the dominant AWS). Airbnb figured out a way to move beyond batch-oriented cron scheduling, gifting us Apache Airflow and data pipelines-as-code.
