Making an Open Source Application More Successful?

morphex asks: "I've written an application for information and task management called the Issue Dealer that has hundreds of users, many of them very satisfied with how it works. However, new user growth has been slow, and there's not much of a community surrounding it. What can I do to encourage wider use of the application, and what can I do to get more developers interested in development and bugfixing? In short, what's missing in this picture to make it an Open Source success story?"

Comments

Clearly...

[Anonymous Coward]

The name is too comprehensible, and one might get a clue as to what it does. Try emulating a succesful project and change it to something like "Ekiga".

Simple

[killmenow]

Get Oracle to buy you. Because, you know, as Larry Ellison says, "Open source becomes successful when major industrial corporations invest heavily in that open source project."

Re: Do as you have just done.

[Black Parrot]

> Well, it does help to post a question about it to "ask slashdot". I did the same thing 3 years ago with my num-utils programs. After that, I definately saw increased usage and it was added to a few Linux distributions. If you're lucky, the same will happen to you.

Well that's strange. I posted my "for a hot night" advertisement^w question to Ask Slashdot three years ago, and I haven't gotten a single phone call!