Becoming antifragile

The author Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes antifragile in his book with the same name as “things that gain from disorder.” While we all understand what fragile means, we don’t really have a word that describes the opposite, so the author claims. The word robust might come to mind, but robust better describes things that don’t change when exposed to disorder, such as uncertainty, variability, imperfect/incomplete knowledge, and error. Antifragility does take a different approach instead of just going further. Antifragile describes things that thrive, evolve, or get better when exposed to stressors or change, and open source software does exactly that.

We need to be more explicit, though, with what we mean when we say open source software. We are not talking about a public GitHub repo that is maintained by a handful of people. While impactful software might start that way, we really refer to enterprise-grade or enterprise-ready software...