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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."
I misread the questions.
The real question is how do you determine if you are successful without having profits.
Its simple. Open source is scratching an itch, right? Is the itch scratched? If yes, then its a success. If it doesn't do what someone else wants, they can add it in, or ask you to do it.
Popularity != Success
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Milestones: establish concrete goals when you start the project, along with a timeline. Of course, these may evolve over time. Happens for commercial apps, too. If concrete milestones aren't met at some point, it's just vapor.
Traffic: both developer and user. Is there a relatively continuous level of input/interest in the project? If developers don't want to develop, and users don't want to use, it's probably going nowhere, even if it's the best thing since the BeOS.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
Are you still having fun?
I've commited some of my spare time to open source projects and even started a few pet projects of my own. While success can sometimes be measured by number of users, or downloads, or mailing list traffic, I think it's worthwhile to step back from the project and make sure you're still having fun. At least that's important for those of us who develop open source software as a hobby as opposed to those who do it for a living (and there are many more hobbiest out there). If suddenly you find yourself dreading to read your mailing list or fire up you text editor or IDE, then you know it's time to take a break or re-evaluate the project.
Then again, every developer and project has different goals and really it's only by these individual metrics that a project or individual's success can be measured.
There was an interesting thread on the Jakarta general mailing list about this a couple months ago. You might want to check it out.
Who said Freedom was Fair?