These were simplistic narratives, written at the periphery, layered atop the complex and diverse forces that drove people to explore. Both suffered from an obvious flaw: many pioneers didn’t welcome civilization once it caught up.

Consider this excerpt from John Mason Peck’s A New Guide For Emigrants to the West, written almost ten years before “manifest destiny” was invented:

First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the “range,” and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude [and] chiefly of his own make…. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The preëmption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his own figures, he “breaks for the high timber,” “clears out for the New Purchase,” or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over…. [T]he real Eldorado is still farther on.

A similar pattern can be seen in the open source community. There has been, for instance, a consistent migratory pattern from Ruby to node.js to Go, Rust, and Elixir. At first, each community is defined by its potential. But as that potential is realized, the community begins to be defined by its compromises. That change is felt most keenly by the people who were there first, who remember what it was like when anything seemed possible. They feel fenced in and so they move on, in search of their golden city.

This isn’t the behavior of people who want to collaborate towards world-class software. This is the behavior of people who want ownership. They want to build something lasting, something which holds its shape even as the world around it changes. They want to force the world to conform to their sensibilities, rather than the other way round.

This won’t be surprising to anyone paying even a little attention to the open source ecosystem. The sheer profusion of frontend frameworks, each trying to differentiate itself in the least possible kilobytes of gzipped Javascript, makes this an obvious conclusion. But the framework for our discussions about open source, introduced by Eric Raymond and unchanged in the ensuing decades, barely acknowledges this reality. We tell ourselves we live in a geocentric universe, even as we use navigational charts that tell us something else entirely.