This is a superbly written piece by Jono Bacon that talks about the problems that occur with many OS projects at the beginning that live for about 2 weeks and then quickly die out. The beauty and charm of OS projects is the fact that you can get people all over the world to help you develop a system. So you come up with an idea and open an account at SourceForge and get started. You expect developers far and wide to flock in and support your project yet you receive no support.
The problem lies in the fact that you are expecting help without providing any starting point for developers. If you wish to start a project and really believe in it, then put the time and effort to get something working. Nobody wants to work on an unusable project so at least give everyone something that they can work with.
Even after you have something working and you have a couple of interested developers, why not only accept patches to your project and that way you get to keep everything under control. Once the project gets to large for you to maintain then you can setup a committee to keep your project alive.
There are too many duplicate projects out there and there are way too many dead projects. Many developers get caught up in the fact that they think they are going to create the next Apache, MySQL, or GNOME and forget that even these projects started from humbling beginnings. The moral is just to remain sensible. Open Source development can be fun, but that doesn’t mean it is easy.
