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

I know the answer to this one.

[BusErrorBob]

Well, just make sure that project isn't like BSD... Because, well, you know, thanks to certain surveys ... BSD is dying!

Not pizza?

[ralico]

I thought it would have been free pizza and beverage on a paypal account.

Re:Doing something people want, cheaper.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

The ones that do the same thing, only poorly, will fail. Like linux on the desktop? The ones that end up costing more to implement than the commercial application, even if they do it better, will fail. According to some sources this is true of Linux. I don't have any answers, just obvious statements to debunk idialogs.

Re:What makes an OSS project successful?

[The Bungi]

I admire your zealotry, but most people are not "forced" to use Windows. They use it because it works and it doesn't require three years of hacker training. They use it because they want a simple desktop OS that can run their games and let them surf the web, write letters or print invitations to their kid's birthday parties, balance their checkbooks and send email to grandma. Your perception of what a computer should be used for may differ, but in the real world that's how things work.

BTW, it's "Windows", not "Windoze".

Re:What makes an OSS project successful?

[maxpublic]

No, no, you've got it all wrong. When responding to a MS fanboy who posts for no other reason than to dump on Linux it's 'Winblows'. Y'know, the sort of thing fanboys dream of doing to Bill should they ever meet him in person.

Max