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What Makes an Open Source Project Successful?

Posted by Cliff on from the what-do-you-measure-your-software-by dept.

crowston asks: "There have been a number of discussions on Slashdot and elsewhere about how good projects work (e.g., Talk To a Successful Free Software Project Leader), but less about how to tell if things are going well in the first place. While this may seem obvious, most traditional definitions of software project success seem inapplicable (e.g., profit) or nearly impossible to measure for most projects (e.g., market share, user satisfaction, organizational impact). In an organizational setting, developers can get feedback from their customers, the marketplace, managers, etc.; if you're Apache, you can look at Netcraft's survey of server usage; but what can the rest do? Is it enough that you're happy with the code? I suspect that the release-early-and-often philosophy plays an important role here. I'm asking not to pick winners and losers (i.e., NOT a ranking of projects), but to understand what developers look at to know when things are going well and when they're not."

5 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Landen · · Score: 5, Informative

    My suggestion, read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric Steven Raymond....not just that paper, but the actual book of papers he put together. Very good read, and he takes a lot of the ideas of open source projects and converts them into real world applications.

    1. Re:Read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by CmdrWass · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you are looking for indicators of success of an open source project, you have to first decide what success is.

      I consider my project, The Java X10 Project, a success based on several factors:

      First: I've had hundreds of downloads, and since I run this project on a Cable Modem connection, my ISP hasn't become unhappy :)
      Second: I've had dozens of email's asking for support as well as asking how to contribute.
      and Third and finally (I think this one is a very good indicator): There are other websites out there that link to my site.

      Oh, and there's a fourth optional measure of success... more for bragging rights... my site is THE FIRST result when querying google with "Java X10".

      All in all, it is a very small project, but I have tangibles that give me a sense of success. Will this ever reach the magnatude of Apache? Probably not, but gawd, I'd prefer it remain relatively small anyway where I can control it. :)

  2. If the project works by Savatte · · Score: 4, Informative

    and it does what it is supposed to do, cleanly and efficiently, then by definition it is successful. Popular and successful are definitely not the same thing, even if you gauge a projects success by its popularity

  3. Re:What makes an OSS project successful? by Chanc_Gorkon · · Score: 1, Informative

    Hey I agree! I tried the Gimp on Linux and said MAN I wish this thing was on Windows......then I found the Windows port. Only reason I wished it was on windows was making my scanner work on SANE is a PITA! My only complaints now is that I wish that the GIMP was able to do CMYK separations, and I WAS going to say the windows port being more up to date but I just noticed that it has caught up to the Linux version. So now I withdraw that complaint! The Windows port is very stable on XP and I use it everyday! TAKE THAT ADOBE!

    --

    Gorkman

  4. Fogel's CVS book covers this by ediron2 · · Score: 3, Informative
    I agree that coolness/spin or a large market or need are critical factors.

    However, those are largely things we don't control. The controllable factors of success are more interesting to me. I guess it's because there are lessons on software engineering here. Cool projects can be run into the ground, and tiny niche projects can do well if they're well-run.

    Hands down, the best nuts-n-bolts coverage I've ever seen on important issues to successfully developing open source is in a book by Karl Fogel, Open Source Development with CVS. Fogel's one of the developers behind CVS and it's planned successor, Subversion

    The book is an interesting paradox: it has 1/2 the chapters GPL'ed. When I started working with CVS, they were useful enough that I bought our development team two copies of the book. Then I read the rest of it... and those are the chapters I'm talking about. Absolutely, they're the best summary of what it takes to successfully run a GPL-ish project. (Ironically, they've GPL'd the technical detail chapters and you have to buy the book to read the parts that talk about things critical to the success of an open source project).

    Success is helped by things like doing lots of releases (seeing progress gets others to buy in, and not seeing progress leads to people quitting in frustration) and only adding features you need (let someone else add the features they need). There's a lot more here, but I'm not about to steal Fogel's thunder. Many of these are ideas that are effective in regular development, especially on custom coding projects within big companies.

    The focus on GPL code is not the same as on shrinkwrapped products: you're not trying to add features just to add selling points. You're trying to get more people to use the project.