What Makes an Open Source Project Successful?

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."

Comments

Read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"

[Landen]

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.

Re:Read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"

[CmdrWass]

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. :)

If the project works

[Savatte]

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