[vitonsky]

Huh, I just checked stats on ecosyste.ms

It looks they consider as maintainer only those people who listed on package.json, not a real number of contributors on github or anything.

So all conclusions in this post is based on wrong assumption and incorrect data interpretation. That's all you need to know about it.

I think you could list random people on github in your package.json to looks cool in eyes of stats cultists.

[em-bee]

that and, i would argue that npm in particular is filled with lots of small projects and only very few large ones simply by the nature of the ecosystem. it is the wrong place to look. something better would probably be to eg count the contributors on github, or, on npm, analyze project dependencies and distinguish projects that are directly downloaded vs those that are loaded as a dependency. arguably, dependencies can be replaced by the developers of the project using it, so a developer of a dependency disappearing is less dramatic than if you use that project directly.

technically speaking, if you have a large project with many contributors, every contributor is often still only responsible for one small part of the project. linux kernel drivers and subsystems most have their dedicated developers. and very few of them each.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

leftpad was a minuscule project that could have been created by anyone. Yet its deletion caused chaos. There are certainly load bearing projects of moderate complexity that are still single person efforts.

[msgodel]

Maintainers and contributors have overlapping but subtly different responsibilities AFAIK.

Maintainers are the ones responsible in the end for the state of the repo while contributors suggest changes.

[vitonsky]

I have couple open source NPM packages I develop together with other developers. In some of this packages I have less than 50% contributions in code. But I listed as contributor on NPM, just because I found this packages and did not update contributors list a long time.

So definitions does not matter when stats that author refers, does not include a developers who own over 50% code in repo, but includes me as contributor.

That's widely known problem of programmers to believe that world is perfect and all data are always actual. Actually it won't.