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

Do as you have just done.

[suso]

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.

Interface

[JordanL]

You certainly have a winning interface.

OSS is hard to make successes with because, most often, the market is flooded with options, (lots of products), and most applications have, well, very specific applications.

version number

[ianturton]

If you bump your version number to 1.0 you may well see take up increase. We certainly saw that with GeoTools Version 1 never got beyond 0.96 beta. When wee restarted with version 2 we decided to bump the version number regularly and are now at 2.2.0 and 2.3.x. Usage certainly went up

Ian

Open Source It (for real)

[mysqlrocks]

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?

First, check out the book Producing Open Source Software, I found it to be a very informative read. As a starting place, your website needs a little help. It's a little bland but that's not the big problem. It needs to be obvious right-away how I, as someone interested in the project, can get involved. You have the mailing list info which is a good start but a look through the archives proves to be quite lacking activity. Your three target groups are end-users, hackers, and developers. How would someone start "hacking" or just playing with your software? Give them some documentation. What is the process for becoming a developer? Where do I submit patches, how do I get commit access to the repository? Where do I submit bug reports?

You need to also ask yourself if you're really ready to release this as an open source project. I don't mean literally under an open source license, like you have done. I mean, are you ready to let a community of developers and users take control of your project and take it in directions you may have not considered? It's been your baby so far (from what I can tell) so this could be quite a change for you but the rewards could be great.

Re:Open Source It (for real)

[DeafByBeheading]

As a starting place, your website needs a little help.

Seconded. Especially for end-users. Your product is a little more technical, so you don't need something perfect, but try to clean it up a little (have clear menu access to all the key parts of your site, organize the content a little better instead of having most stuff on the front page, have a news section for major updates/events, etc.). Also, make sure that it displays well in a variety of browsers (especially since with a technical audience, you're likely to be seeing all sorts of things running on all sorts of OSes)...

You have a marketing problem.

[AnonymousPrick]

Which brings up an interesting issue: get marketing folks involved with F/OSS?

Or, maybe an MBA project for one /.'ers who are going for that degree and publish the project on Freshmeat or something? Why not? I've never seen a F/OSS project that deals with the business side. Maybe it's time for that.

Get it into distributions

[swillden]

At least for Linux usage, one of the best things you can do is to get your package into major distributions, so that when users are looking for something like your tool, they'll find it in the most accessible, easiest-to-install place. For commercial distros, this is a somewhat difficult thing to do, but a lot of desktop Linux users use a community-oriented distro, like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. In most cases you can get your package into those distributions simply by creating the package and then volunteering to maintain it.

When creating the package, think hard about the description. You want it to be relatively brief, but accurate, and with all of the terms people would search for when looking for your package, but avoid "spamming" the package search. Also, make sure that your packages install and unistall very smoothly and cleanly, and do everything possible to ensure that the installation process requires no manual configuration steps. It's fine (and good!) to allow the user to tweak the configuration later, but try to give them something fully functional and usable right after the automated installation.