The open source library holding up your stack might have one maintainer Every serious software product runs on code that someone else wrote and released for free. A web service leans on a cryptography library, a data pipeline pulls in a parser, and a mobile app ships a handful of small utilities that one person maintains in spare time. All of it carries the same label. A new paper argues that the single label hides differences large enough to change how each piece behaves once it lands in production. Researchers sorted open source software into fourteen sub-genres, each defined by who starts and sustains a project and to what end. Their review screened close to four thousand unique papers drawn from two scholarly indexes. The result is a typology, along with an argument that the kind of…