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Community Involvement for an Open Source Project?
pfleming asks: "Several months ago I began a maintenance fork of some niche software. Essentially, these are PHP/MySQL scripts for real estate offices.
The original developer moved on to an incompatible version to what I was using. Upgrading for me and many other users was not the easiest option. Luckily the software is GPL'd and so continued work on the fork is not a big deal.
I have set up a site, made it available for download, announced the availability of the fork on Freshmeat and the forums for the original software. Now I have a few people subscribed to the project on Freshmeat, and a few on a mailman list set up for the project. This project has been listed on the GNU Website and other mirror sites but doesn't get much discussion on the mailman list and nothing from the Freshmeat subscribers. There is usually an increase in interest (indicated by a short term increase in site hits) when new releases are announced but this fades back to regular traffic of ~40 visits per day as measured by webalizer after a short period of time. Is this an anomaly? Should I be thankful that there aren't tons of bug reports and feature requests?"
What other thoughts does Slashdot have on this subject?"
"More questions for you to chew on:
- Is there more interest in a new project vs. one that is more or less mature?
- Is the project too narrow to attract an audience?
- Could the underlying business (real estate) just be too saturated with web sites?
What other thoughts does Slashdot have on this subject?"
This seems pretty normal. Any time you make an announcement on your project (including releases) you are going to drive traffic to its web site (that's why corporations pump out press releases). The fact that it dies down afterwards is totally normal, you'd expect people to come, see what's going on, download the stuff and leave.
Should I be thankful that there aren't tons of bug reports and feature requests?
Probably not. This might be an indication that the software is wonderful, but it's more likely an indication that the user base is small. As the user base increases they are going to find all sorts of weird problems (especially with different machine/OS configurations) which will get reported as bugs.
Is there more interest in a new project vs. one that is more or less mature?
I don't think new vs. old is as important as good vs. bad. If your project is useful and well executed then you'll get hits. Just compare Mozilla with any of the thousands of "new" projects listed on SourceForge.
Is the project too narrow to attract an audience?
I doubt that. Real Estate is a massive business world wide.
Could the underlying business (real estate) just be too saturated with web sites?
That's possible in any business, if your project had some uniqueness then the saturation will not be important. Getting the message out about your feature set will.
Just what are the secrets to a successful (measured by lots of contributors, etc) project...or am I just not defining success correctly?
I don't think number of contributors is the most important measure. How about number of people actually using the software? In POPFile there's a feature where it can report back (opt in) that it's being used, this gives me an idea of how many downloads converted into users. Another measure of success would be mentions of your project in the press.
John.
No. Because they are PHP/MySQL scripts for real estate offices. Calculate number of real estate offices in the US. Substract those that have a meaningful IT infrastructure beyond a few PCs to type and print contracts. Then substract those that use custom software. Then substract those that don't use an Office/VBA solution, or simply a Microsoft platform (and from my experience those are the majority). Then substract those that have actual in-house developers. Finally, substract those that use PHP and MySQL, specifically. Then add the number of people who create and sell software solutions for real estate offices based on PHP/MySQL. There you go, about 40 people.
If you are Apache, Perl, Python, GAIM, etc, etc. then yes, it's an anomaly. What you're seeing is about right, considering it's a pretty narrow niche. People won't get excited about something just because it's listed on FreshMeat and is GPLE'd. There are one-liner bash scripts there with wider audience than your code.
But I don't see what you're worried about - that's how it works. The fact that its released will eventually help someone out. Just don't expect Yahoo-sized traffic.
you should've linked directly to your project from the slashdot post. (We all know that slashdot is really just a front for the real estate mafia.)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Samba-tng forked off of samba quite a while ago. The user base using tng is still very small. There is a flurry of people checking it out each time a new release comes out (Which lately has been due to security problems in both code bases).
The user lists are fairly slow, and there are a few developers on the dev lists. The development is still highly active, but the purpose of TNG isn't as important to most people as the functionality and features of Samba it self. The people who need to the changes made in TNG, will go to TNG. However, the vast majority of people don't need anything beyond what the base Samba 2.x or 3.x code has.
Then again.. I would also say, most people haven't checked out the rad features included in rpcclient with tng.. which makes pen testing windows extremely easy.. Oh wait, so does dcom.
Yes, you should be. And, you should be thankful that SCO hasn't gotten a hold of your code yet...
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
It seems likely that the project is Free Realty.
John.
For those interested, here's the link to the Free Realty project.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The majority of user base propably upgraded to the incompatible version. People simply may not need your fork, but it's always a good thing to have for those who need it (40 people is quite a lot IMHO for a real estate open source software :))
I help develop and maintain a project for computational structural biology, and our project stats look pretty similar to yours. We release, see an interest spike, then it dies down.
Factor in that you're in a very niche market -- real estate offices who have the need for a dedicated software package, who know enough about computers to use Linux/PHP/Apache, and who don't have in-house developers. Then, consider that you're not actually maintaining the original project, but a project that branched from the original so that users won't have to upgrade. It doesn't leave many interested users.
This is part of the justification behind "release early, release often" -- the more you release, the more hits you generate, and the more likely you are to find interested users. All the same, don't expect to get the hits of the next big RPG platform or internet chat application. The users just aren't there.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Can I just ask, pretty please, to not have to wade through 46 SCO jokes everytime anything has to do with code?
You know what?
I wrote some SQL scripts and noone has clicked my pay pal link. What am I doing wrong?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You have to let people know the project exists. Simply listing it on freshmeat won't get you much, as I know (I've listed a couple of projects there). My site gets practically zero traffic from those listings.
There are a couple things I've found that help. First, find a discussion group focused on a subject relevant to your project, and mention it occasionally when it becomes relevant to the discussion -- this gets you kickstarted, but it's not a long-term solution. Second, you might start some kind of blog on the site, so that people have a reason to follow your progress. Rant about the state of the real estate market or something. This is the long-term solution.
I've done both of these things, and eventually they get you a lot more traffic than freshmeat ever will. The more traffic you get, the more likely that someone will link to your site, which will raise your google ranking, which increases the amount of traffic you get, which starts the whole feedback loop all over again. You just need to focus on making sure that your visitors have a reason to link you once they're there.
I assume you meant that you reckon, or think or assume, that it might offend, and not that you reconnoitered, or made a preliminary inspection or scouted, that it would offend ("recon" being an accepted shortened form of "reconnoiter" in the verb sense you used, or "reconnaissance" in the noun form which you didn't).
You can just spam it maybe you will get 6000 ideas for a product that does actually works. Or a new hate club whatever comes first. ;-)
well i'm sure you'll have more hits than you ever imagined now.... Go slashdotting affect (or is it effect?)
Ave Molech Setting
I too maintain niche projects, some bigger than others, some more popular than others. Here's how I understand the dynamics of a community around a projects. You have 3 cases :
... i.e. bits of work done not by you, but you still end up integrating the changes and act as the only maintainer of the project.
1) your project is too specialized, you have a smallish community of people who use it, few bug reports now and then, and you end up doing all the work on your project.
2) your project is interesting enough that the community around it grows to a point where most of the improvements come from patches, bug reports
3) your project is very interesting and the community around it grows exponentially. The improvements / bug reports flood you and, essentially, your own bandwidth is not enough to maintain the project. You have to delegate and trust other people, in which case A) you're a shitty project manager and someone else who has that talent eventually makes a code fork and takes it over, or B) you become a successful OSS project maintainer, the extreme case of which, for example, is Linus.
The added fun is that, if you code well while you start the project, it can go from a shitty thing to something of interest, just because the look-n-feel that detracted people from trying it before now attracts more people. That's where all the interest is, see how you can "prime the pump" and build a community around your ideas by doing the initial work, then watch the improvements come already made.
I personally choose to create/maintain projects that I reckon will fall in or near category 2), because I don't want to maintain big projects anymore, with the flood of patches, suggestions and hate mail that comes with it, but I don't want to end up having my name associated with a shitty tarball that nobody cares about either.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
As for being thankful about not having bugs and feature requests, well I suppose it depends on your outlook. I can imagine you're the only person who can answer it you. Coding for your own sake? Then it's probably good, you can set your own direction without any monkeys on your back. If you're coding for the glory, well, perhaps a broader choice of topic might help. ;)
It's simple. People are poor. They are working to feed their families now. Nobody is interested in coding for free. Mod me down, but it's the fucking truth. The only people writing code for free these days are insanely wealthy introverts (few and far between) and the few college kids that are still supported by mommy and daddy, who also have the attention span of a gnat.
What the guy needs to do is get a few RE offices up and running with the software and get those RE agents to talk to others about it. In addition there are specialist RE web sites where RE agents could discuss the project and hence get more coverage of his project
;-) Then when the next people try it they will have an easier time :-)
Yes, but the important part here is that by helping other people impliment this you *will* discover quirks/bugs/out-of-spec behavior in your project. The quality will improve greatly and you will soon have another, better release
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
A month ago I did a whole bunch of work for a real estate agent in his home office, making hardware and software upgrades, etc. I have seen the multi-listing and real-estate specific database software that they are using, and while based on some ancient code, it was very powerful, very polished and good, and from what I gather, the software from this company is quite entrenched in the real estate business.
I installed and setup systems using Agent Office/Online Agent and for the Lightning 2000 mls service, which essentially seems to be a very fancy terminal emulator. screenshots here They have been buying software from this company for FOURTEEN YEARS. You're competing against some big guns I think. The best thing you've got going for you is that these softwares are quite expensive, due to the fact that they are niche softwares, and that there is a lot of money in real estate. If you can offer a better real-estate -specific database at a lower price, maybe you can compete, but it had better convert and import the database they already have.
Your dullness oozes from every inflection.
Dylan is a wonderful, elegant, extensible language that really puts Java to shame. Usually when there's a programming language article on slashdot, people end up describing their dream language... and it usually what they describe matches Dylan quite well. But still it's very hard to attract new programmers to the language.
It's a great compiler, and a team using it earned second place in the 2001 ICFP Programming Contest. The compiler is still being improved, but in all honestly, there's just a few dedicated volunteers working on it.
I don't know how to explain it's lack of "success", except to note that few geeks are really geeky enough to stray away from the mainstream languages.
Buzz is when other people say good things about you. Hype is when you try to inflate activity by going about it yourself.
I prefer buzz. My own software projects are posted on my web servers and have plenty to offer to those who find them. Someone eventually wanders by, sees it, likes it, then mentions it to someone else. Many of these mentions happen on Usenet or mailing lists that get archived. Now people searching for certain terms will find those posts that link to me.
Eventually, people who run directories like dmoz will get a hold of it and index it somewhere. This will get even more people coming by. Over time, you'll build a base of users who have it installed and stop by once in awhile to see what's new. Having a moderated mailing list that does nothing but announce new releases helps a lot.
This is not an exaggeration. I have a project that's gone from rather small to pleasantly healthy in the space of about 5 years. To give you some idea of how long ago it was, I posted my one and only direct reference to it here on Slashdot before you had to log in. Back in those days you could just put in a name, u@h, and URL, and it would be attached to your post.
You also have to realize that some projects are not going to have a very large audience. Unless you happen to address the needs of many, don't expect a whole lot of activity. Those who find it will appreciate it, but the rest simply have no use for it. That's life.
By the way, you can probably get by without appearing on Freshmeat constantly. My own projects have only had a couple of announcements on there, all due to someone else. None of those people really stayed with it, so the last version is stuck at something from a year ago. I don't operate on the basis of updating other web sites, so it's not going to be maintained by me, either.
Well undoubtedly his hits are about to increase a tad bit...
The original developer moved on to an incompatible version to what I was using. Upgrading for me and many other users was not the easiest option. (...) Should I be thankful that there aren't tons of bug reports and feature requests?"
Is it possible that the majority of your user base aren't really that interested in new features, but basicly want to keep the (well-working) system they have, just as you did? On the same note, isn't it also likely that those that are happy with the old product are also mostly the same that haven't been bitten by any major bugs?
To me, the situation seems pretty normal for a system that is in more or less "maintenance" mode. Now, the question is if that is what you want it to be, or do you want to start new development based on this platform? If it's the latter, you'd have to work rather intensely to argue for why going away from that system (to an incompatible one) was a poor decision. Many developing new features subscribe to the idea that to make an omelet, you need to break a few eggs...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Open Source, like anything other business, requires Marketing. You need to do market research, advertise your product, and most importantly, get customers.
Find out how to make money from your software. If you can't, is it a worthwhile hobby?
Finally, what is your business model? Are you going to be a consultant or sell the software or both?
If you're going to sell the software, consider moving to a different platform, like Java or .NET. PHP scripts are a hard sell. When Zend gets their act together and...
- Developes a stable (as in not breaking previous code with almost every release) platform
- Improves performance
- Makes it easier to interface your script with other applications
then PHP would be a good sell.Slashdot needs less shameless self promotion. Whether it be in the form of articles or shameless plugs for one's own tiny project embedded in a poster's sig, the shameless self-advertisement must stop!
Yes. I am kidding.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
As people have remarked, and you yourself said, it's a niche market.
You often see people claim a benefit for OSS that it'll be bug-free because everyone can examine the source for bugs. (An even more extreme claim is that OSS will be more secure because it's been scoured for secruity problems, implying people are proactively inspection the software even when its not barfing on them.) What that claim overlooks, however, is that very few people will actually bother to do so. They could, in theory, but they won't, any more than if the source were closed.
It's niche software with few users. But of those users, even fewer are going to care about actually looking at the code. Most users have a problem to solve, and that doesn't include debugging your code. They just want to use the software.
And all the other developers aren't going to rush over to your project and start code inspecting it for you. They've got their own projects to do. The 40,000 people writing Yet Another Text Editor / Ide aren't going to drop everything and help you out, as it's not their current interest. So it doesn't matter than 40,000 developers could inspect your software; it won't actually happen just because your source is available.
Thus, you aren't going to get hits in proportion to the number of potential developers that could see your code. You're going to get hits in proportion to the number of actual users -- and you're going to get actual support from the fraction of those users that are (a) programmers and (b) have time to spare. For niche software, that will be small.
Large, popular, trendy, and crucial projects will get a lot of attention. Other projects won't particularly benefit just from slapping an OSS label on it and creating a freshmeat homepage. There's this notion that there's a huge pool of idle programmers just waiting for something to do on OSS; the reality is that there's a huge number of OSS projects just waiting for someone to do something with them.
The most important thing is that it is useful to you.
I recently listed a project on freshmeat as well as posted information to usenet newsgroups where some will find it relative and interesting to the newsgroup.
The description was edited by a freshmeat editor and could probably be written differently to attract a little more attention. But this project is not going to die, cause I won't let it... Cause it's useful to me, and that's the most important I can think of.
projects smaller than "large" usually consist of one-three maintainers, some 3-4 "minor contributors" who supply hints, bug reports, small handy hacks and good ideas on irregular basis, several "fans" who look for updates, sometimes report bugs or help newcomers by answering questions, and besides that, small, regular flux of visitors who come, maybe ask a question or two, look, eventually download and go usually without ever saying thank you. I've seen that with several projects I participated in, as such "fan" or "minor contributor". From time to time some fan or minor contributor leaves, sometimes a new one finds it and stays. If the maintainer leaves the project though, it dies quite quickly, unless someone else decides to take over and continue the work. That doesn't happen often though.
:) 3) No suggestions, ideas, patches - probably the design is so good that nobody feels need for these.
:)
:)
Look at this from positive side. 1) 40 visitors a day, means maybe 1-4 new sites using your software. 2) No bug reports - probably no bugs so that's very good, isn't it?
(of course it could be opposite, after first look people discard it and never think about it again, but...
One of good ideas to "exist" on the market is to package your stuff for some major distributions and try to include it - even if not in core of one, then at least in official software archives. So crazy people like me, who look through all packages dselect displays get to notice it
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I would like for your software to get me free houses and land. What is the ETA? Thanks. BTW I know millions of people will use your software after this feature is added.
Most people don't want the best piece of software available for a problem. They want software which is good enough. Once they've found something which is good enough, they'll probably stay with it, even if better options become available.
To take a personal example, bsdiff is a tool for generating binary patches (in particular, for upgrading software). It is measurably and quantifiably better -- that is, it produces smaller patch files -- than any other software available, both free and commercial (eg, $2750/seat). Despite this, the only place where I'm aware of bsdiff being used is in another project of my own (FreeBSD Update). Most people found a tool which was "good enough" for their needs a long time ago, and aren't going to change now.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
As the troll goes on, make it more and more controversial, building it up for the coup de grace in the final paragraph.
/. readers - call them long-haired Linux zealots, socialist open-source bigots or whatever
:)
That's WRONG! Most people skip to the end and read a few last lines if they give up reading the whole article. Make the end look just closing your starting point in some witty manner, and put whatever you want to troll about in the middle of rather long and boring paragraph describing in-depth details of what you write about, best located somewhere 75% the text length. (like getting moderated up for a post where special certificates are issued to people who finish course in Zebra, and the long, described in details process of gaining the certificate involves going to Africa and having sex with a real zebra).
Make broad generalizations about
If someone posts something that may be dangerous to the health of your troll, i.e. points out some very deep inconsistency, claim thye are members of GNAA
wondering who on Earth cares about it.
No matter how valid or invalid, gets -1 offtopic ALWAYS.
1) Knock together LAMP project and host on Freshmeat.
2) Post story on Slashdot moaning about lack of traffic to project website
3) ???
4) PROFIT!!!
Sex with a mare is great! And even SQL programmer can do it! More, even a HTML "programmer" can do it!
With their tech-savvy (or law-savvy or whatever) experience, the expert is obviously the best person to point out what's wrong with things or to give out useful factual information.
:)
The best troll is not the one which leaves people pissed off after what they read, so they find out it's a troll. The best one is if it leaves people with their harddrives trashed after they followed your advice! If you have really deep insight in the problem and know of a killer-bug which looks innocent in what you describe, lure people into trying that ("removes some unnecessary overhead", "kills some stupid garbage collector that is a legacy from times when it was needed yet and unless you use (some very useless X) you don't need it and your performance will skyrocket.")
If someone answers to your troll "I followed your advice, you bastard...", call yourself a master troll
Well anyway, if you really want to attract more attention to this project, here are some important things to consider:
Real estate people mostly don't get the free as in freedom of speech and/or free as in beer concepts.
Want to get their input? Sell the thing, it's still open source, and you're not going against the GPL and should be able to keep your pages at Freshmeat, GNU.org and SF (if you do have a project site there).
Know how to pimp your project... When targeting RE agents, showcase the commercial features... When targeting coders, showcase the technical features (like plugins/modules, themes, some sort of data extraction layer, etc. etc.)
Most importantly give incentive to people who contributed code/fixes.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Pick it up.. and stop complaining. This is an exercise for the programmer in its purest form.
Already i've had the time to read many posts relating to this lament, however the author here still hasn't updated his site that something is going down with his shiz... I've now gone to openrealty and the offshoot program and it's quite cute. Don't expect marketing to work if you have no clue of its nature...
It could also be that people are just modding open source software and billing up the yin/yang for it and making sure that their secrets are safe.
Who can tell - nothing surprises me anymore.
The problem is really the market and the functionality that the software provides. Yes real estate is a huge market but it is dominated by two types of brokers: 1. Small brokers with less than 5 agents. 2. large offices with hundreds or thousands of agents.
The small offices usally get free or very cheap web sites that contain listings from the MLS's (that is that database where all listings in a market are stored). These people could be a potential market for you but they are not going to contribute anything to the cause either in code or money.
The large companies have the budget to put these sites together using a staff of developers and web designers. The developers and designers that create these sites might use your code as as starting point and may or may not contribute to the project.
The other problem is the functionality of the software. It is very easy and inexpensive to create a web site that displays property listings. What people need in the real estate industry is a system that will save them time and reduce the number of times they need to enter property information in to all their systems.
These types of systems are what my company creates and we have been talking about open sourcing our apps. Feel free to checkout our site and contact me if you are interested in working together on extending your product with more functionality. www.datixres.com
I've run into the same thing as you. I wrote an open source issue tracking system and didn't get a lot of feedback either. I've had about 12000 downloads over the past year but probably less than 20 real bug reports and even less feature requests. I've tried the freshmeat, sourceforge, google, and forum routes and it doesn't change much.
:)
I'd love to find a good way to attract more user participation, mainly because I'd like to improve the product for my own use and I've found that other people tend to give me really good ideas for features, when they aren't bogged down in the actual coding like I am.
It is difficult to even get people to tell to drop by and "vote" in an online poll to tell me their environment so I know where to focus my efforts to get the most benefit to the community.
One good thing about writing my own software though is I'm much more likely to write to an author of an application I use to thank them, or drop by a forum and let them know I use it. Heck I'll even write bug reports now
Actually from a turing-completeness standpoint HTML and SQL are basically equivalent (ie, both are not).
What you need to do is go on every related web forum, newsgroup, mailing list, etc. (not under your real name, of course) and astroturf -- that is, claim to be an ordinary user who just discovered this product out of the blue, and has benefited enormously. Get all the rest of the developers to do this also, and some of the more committed users. Pretty soon you can get a snowball effect, and use all of the buzz you've manufactured to claim your product is "the most popular", "focused on ordinary users", "has a thriving community", etc. This kind of tactic has worked wonders for Gentoo Linux, despite marketing a product which in most important respects either duplicates features of its competition or is many years behind. I'm sure your PHP scripts aren't that bad, so you can probably achieve similar success this way.
As one who have fostered more than 150 open-source projects on Freshmeat - no I ain't the author for all of them, just find 'em and then list 'em on Freshmeat in the hope that the worldwide open-source community will somehow be enriched by the wider selection, I can tell you that unless your project is really, _really_ address a large segment of the public at large, the "flow" of enquirers will slow to a trickle - sometimes, even to 1 or 2 per day.
One thing that I've found, on my experience on fostering the large number of open-source projects on Freshmeat, is that the projects that release more often will get more attention from the visitors/users and those projects that didn't get much upgrades will slowly "die off".
On some of the projects that I fosters, there isn't any mail list activity at all. Either the software is so perfect that no one asks for new features or reports any bug, or nobody cares enough to post any question at all.
It's the real world out there - even Open-Source projects have to COMPETE for the attention of the users.
I've communicated with some of the projects' authors, and I can tell you that there are some those who really care about how others feel about their "babies" - and respond very quickly to requests/reports - but then there are those who think they are better than the users and never care to address any complaint/suggestion.
Well
And to your project - I've not visited it, so I have no idea what's it about - perhaps you can find the following ways useful to increase the participation of your users
1. Make your project more useful to more users - perhaps by adding features that they request (which may mean making your project a bloatware, it's a trade-off).
2. Be proactive and not wait for the users to ask questions - get feedback from the users by asking them what they think of your software, and how it can better serve them, etc.
3. Advertise your project as wide as possible, use all the available means - UseNet, MailLists, WebForums.
4. Perhaps you may consider making "plugins" for your projects, and in this way you can "slim down" your core program, in the meantime you can tailor your project to the needs and wants of different users.
5. Put out updates, bugfixes and new feature announcements as often as you can. And remember to notify your users about the latest features.
6. Please be gentle to the users - I've seen some of the abusive authors berating users for no other reason except their own ego trip.
I am sure there are other nice tips available, and I welcome anyone to add to my comment here.
Thank you, and good luck !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"measure of success" is just a vague way of saying "what i want out of it". so dig deep into your psyche and figure out what you want. that's it.
for example, i am a programmer and usually what i want out of any collaborative project more than anything (more than users, more than fame, more than financial gain) is to find a fellow programmer who shares the vision of the project and has the comptetency and cycles to build upon the work. for me, the primary measure of success for a project is how well hackers (that i can respect) take to it. ymmv.
are similar. I maintain a dictionary program for PalmOS devices (japanese/english, I think you can find it if you search - this is not about advertisments...), and it's mainly the same thing.
;)
When there's a new version release, and I announce it on freshmeat, the site get's many hits, and that holds up for about a week.
I don't get much bug reports, either. By now the program is small, so there aren't many bugs to expect, but I think it depends very very much on the user base. Especially if all people are using similar environments you won't expect many errors you did not encounter. Most "bugs" are generated by different software versions in the environment, I think. Or don't you test it...?
Sometimes there are people active on the mailing list, but mostly it's silent. But I don't worry about that, as the site gets about 30-100 hits/day, what means that people are watching the project.
Just don't worry and keep work up. Of course you could try to be more "aggressiv" to get user feedbacks, like putting a bigger "please mail me your experiences" in the INSTALL, but I don't think one can get much out of it.
As long as you get downloads, but don't get tons of bugreports, the people seem to be lucky with your program. And no one could be made to contribute...
Having a look at this piece of software's website, I'm not surprised that it does not attract many users. It looks like so many OS project sites, i.e. long on coder stuff and short on user stuff.
What might benefit this and many other projects would be the developer looking on it as a commercial product that happens to be free open source rather than just an open source project. In other words, they should ask the question "If this was a commercial product, would people buy it based upon the resources I'm giving them?".
Obvious places to start might be full easy-to-read documentation and a step-by-step tutorial with one sylable words and pretty pictures. And a well turned out website really helps, too. There's no point saying "It works with Lynx" if all your customers use IE on windoze and it looks bad on that platform.
I appreciate that many OS coders will say they havent got time for all that. Fair enough. But if you want your project to bridge the gap into the mass market, IMHO that's important enough to make time for.
I have an open source project which after a few months of releases is slowly attracting users. I did not release it at all until I had full HTML documentation, a tutorial, a well put together web site and as many other as I could think of of the things I'd expect from my software if I had to pay for it. Only time will tell if the extra effort was worth it but I am confident that it was and I'd advise any other OS developers to do the same.
I looked at your program, and stopped when it just became too much of a hassle to install. It looked as if it will do what I was looking for, but because my servers (Tomcat/Oracle) don't look like yours (JBoss/MySQL), I'm not sure how long it will take to get it running and don't have the time to configure things to make it so.
The fact that this is being posted on slashdot instead of your site should tell you something.
As far as "success" goes, you do need to define success before you can decide if you have it. There is no single definition. Only you can decide if your project is meeting the goals you have set for it. I'd say that if you have a user community, active development and a roadmap for the future then your project is successful. One of the implications of a Pareto distribution is that the vast majority of projects are "small" in terms of users, developers and activity. So don't think you have failed just because you are not mentioned in the same breath as Apache, Samba and the Linux Kernel.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Actually released on 1966's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme.
Just what are the secrets to a successful (measured by lots of contributors, etc) project...or am I just not defining success correctly?
Does it work? Then it's successful. A successful project doesn't have anything to do with your five minutes of fame on freshmeat. If you're looking for a pat on the back and a compliment you can better start doing something else. Writing software to get attention will get you nowhere.
I found the freshmeat project record for Jatha, and it appears that you haven't made a single front page announcement. No offense, but it's sort of unreasonable to expect people to discover your project if it doesn't hit the front page, unless it's so great that people find the project record via other means.
Every time a new release comes out, you can [should] use the "add release" link to submit a front page announcement. This also updates the version number, and gives you a chance to update the URLs. You'll often see a spike in hits from these announcements (unless, of course, your project is totally uninteresting, but we can't help you with that).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
My guess is that very few programmers feel the need to write software for real estate companies. This means that the pool of "free" developers is very small.
The normal way around this is for companies to sponsor a developer part time. That way they get what the need worked on, instead of just whatever the programmers happen to feel like. (You encountered this problem when the original developer decided to change the file formats. Well, companies do this also, but since it's GPL, you have the option of continuing development. But this doesn't make finding the developer painless...particularly since now it's maintenance, not the most attractive of choices for a programmer.)
Perhaps the best choice would be to organize a "consortium" of real estate agencies that use this program and together hire someone to work on it. If there were 10 of you, each would only need to pay for 1/10 of a person to hire someone full time. The alternative would be to find some way to make it very interesting to someone. I think, however, that sponsoring a college student could be a good choice, if you can find the right student (a difficult problem, I admit).
Remember, GPL means libre, not gratis.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
http://freshmeat.net/faq/view/39/
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Success is happiness. That is, if you're happy with your results, you're succeeding.
You don't have to measure your satisfaction with your project by any particular measure but the one that matters to you. If you want lots of users, go for it. If you just code for the love of coding, there you go - that's all you need.
Bear in mind that any fork is a bit political. Some users may feel a degree of loyalty to the original project, or may just not have heard of your fork.
Ok. So you didn't get it. The link in the sig and my homepage are both to my own tiny project... sorry. if you still find that offensive...
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Crudely Drawn Games
I love it -- I think -- when I get replies like this in my Metamoderation bucket. On one hand, it's +1, Insightful... on the other, it's -1, Troll. Makes me wish for a "+/- 1, Insightful Troll" moderation.
So I'm faced with this question:
Original Discussion: Community Involvement for an Open Source Project?
Rating: Troll.
This rating is Unfair ( ) (o) ( ) Fair
I don't believe in wimping out and selecting the middle choice, so I picked Fair. It's a troll. It just happens to be an Interesting and/or Insightful one.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Thanks for all the interesting and thoughtful comments. I see there are several areas that need work that either I overlooked or thought weren't as important as some of you said they were.
I originally didn't post the project url thinking that I would get more generalized and non biased opinions regarding my question. Not only did you look up the project in question, but even the original author (Jon Roig) spoke up regarding the current state of developement on the original branch.
I have also come to reconsider who my target market is. True, the project purports to be for real estate agents but I think it is more for the mini-IT departments supporting those agents. None of my own direct users have any knowlege of html,php, mysql, etc. They want to be able to edit/update listings and they want it to work.
The ability to change the look with skins or templates as suggested will probably be one of the non-essential upgrades that I will work on implementing.
Documentation and a potential rework of the project site are now on the table.
Again, thanks,