Open collaboration runs on trust. For a long time, that trust was protected by a natural, if imperfect filter: friction. If you were on Usenet in 1993, you’ll remember that every September a flood of new university students would arrive online, unfamiliar with the norms, and the community would patiently onboard them. Then mainstream dial-up ISPs became popular and a continuous influx of new users came online. It became the September that never ended. Today, open source is experiencing its own Eternal September. This time, it’s not just new users. It’s the sheer volume of contributions. ## When the cost to contribute drops In the era of mailing lists contributing to open source required real effort. You had to subscribe, lurk, understand the culture, format a patch correctly, and explain why it mattered. The effort didn’t guarantee quality, but it filtered for engagement. Most contributions came from someone who had genuinely engaged with the project. It also excluded people.…