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.

Part of the problem here

[sexyrexy]

Is that you're not filling a need. I have also written an issue tracker ([Companyname] Issues) that manages Software, Hardware & Networking, Building Maintenence, and a separate interface (same engine) for customer-related support tickets. I also know two other people who have written such software for their companies. For OSS, or any software for that matter, (or any product, for that matter!) to take off is that it has to fulfill a previously unmet need, or it needs to fulfill that need in a significant way that no existing tool does. If you can articulate why/how your software does this, then things will naturally take their course.

Make presentations about it

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

A lot of people get interested in technologies when they hear it examplained and can ask the developer - and face to face is much easier than by email.

To really get the value out of it, try to have your presentation recorded (like these from FOSDEM and other conferences). And if you really want to get picked up by search engines and be accessible to deaf users and others with particular needs, event transcripts make for greppable copies of talks and presentations.

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".

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

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."

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.

OK, It's about effective communication.

[hey!]

First thing, people need to know you exist. So you got yourself on the front page of Slashdot, well done. Now onto step 2.

Step 2 is, you have to communicate what marketing people would call a "market position". What this amounts to is a succint message which tells the person looking at your product the exact niche it fills that nobody else can.

If you fail to define for yourself what your market position is, your project may have no justification for its existence, unless you luck into it. If you fail to communicate what your market position is, you can't motivate people to bother checking your project out, unless they have a lot of time on their hands and nothing interesting to do. This may artificially limit your user base.

Your web site starts this way:The Issue Dealer is an application for managing information. Well, the same can be said of Oracle. Or the Reiser File system. As you go on, I gradually get the idea what this product does, but you never close the deal. After reading your web site, I still don't make it clear why I'd want to use it rather than, say a CRM with issue tracking, or Bugzilla or Microsoft Outlook. Unfortunately, your demo site doesn't inform the user much more as the data is not very enlightening to somebody who is not part of your project.

You need to come up with a single paragraph that informs the user exactly what your software does that uniquely benefits him. After that the next most important thing is to clear up any misconceptions the user may have that your product is "just like" something he's already familiar with.

For example, let's do a makeover here on the first couple of paragraphs of your front page. Admittedly, it is not very good since I don't know what your product actually does:

The Issue Dealer is a tool that combines the documentation power of a knowledge management system, the organizational impact of an issue tracker, the brainstorming capabilties of an outliner, and the collaborative power of a weblog into a single easy to use system. Organizations use Issue Dealer to make sure that all the important things that come up in the day have a place to go where they will not be lost, whether they are customer support issues, ideas, goals, or reference information.

While it might seem like a system that does all these things has to be complex, it's actually the opposite. Where special sytems gain their power by adding lots of aracane and seldom used features, Issue Dealer gains its power by bringing all your tracking activities under a single roof. Your users will appreciate not having to learn many different systems with all kinds of complicated bells and whistles, or having to decide whether a particular issue belongs in the bug tracker or CRM system. Above all, Issue Dealer is a fun and interactive way for your group to stay focused and improve performance.

Your IT department will appreciate not having to learn how to install and maintain a half dozen or more complex systems built on incompatible technolgies. And since it's web based, installation and deployment is a snap. Because Issue Dealer is Open Source and uses all standard components, your organization will enjoy a high degree of security and flexibility without paying through the nose for it. And while Issue Dealer works with your email system, it isn't tied to it so tightly that your tracking system is affected by the security and scalability issues that often afflict email.

Issue Dealer is ideal for a highly creative small business, or group within a larger business, that's more interested in improving the consistency of follow through than on maintaining multiple systems that do more or less the same thing.

Now, I'm at two disadvantages here: (1) I'm not a marketing guy so I don't really know how to do this professionally and (2) I don't really know what you're product is about. The problem though is after looking at your web page I still don't REALLY know what it's about. There's nothing to motivate me to download and try this thing.