When open source loses the shine

Sterling Hughes has an “interesting post”:http://www.edwardbear.org/blog/archives/000214.html on how open source can become less fun:

bq. Then let’s say you end up creating something really cool. Businesses and corporations start to rely heavily on this stuff: It is used by millions of applications. Now when you break backwards compatibility it becomes a huge issue. If you goof up; if your code isn’t up to snuff when committed, people with children to feed suffer. You have angry messages on Slashdot, users who whine and complain. Heck, sometimes the sky even falls on your head. You’ve essentially become an unpaid business. You start using terms like “the users,” and “the enterprise.” You start talking about evangelism. You start making bonds, pacts, deadlines and compromises. You stop thinking about the most innovative solution, and start thinking about the most acceptable solution.

bq. You stop doing things because they are cool. You make the prudent choices. You ride the wave and become a technological gem. More effort is focused on QA, and so the quality and reliability go up. You start standardizing processes and whitespace guidelines. You create release versioning schemas, and you dictate to developer’s how they should code, and where they should put their code. You deal with licensing issues. [...] You start looking at opportunity costs, and how to maximize your time. Your fanclub becomes a business and the result is that the exhuberance that you once had becomes drudgery.==

“sendcard”:http://www.sendcard.org/ has become like this. Do I always want to answer support questions? Nope, but it’s an established script and people expect it. When a bug’s found, do I want to drop everything else and fix it? Nope again, but unless I do people complain.

Now, I can’t kid myself that sendcard is as popular as the kind of program -Starling- Sterling is talking about, but it does give an idea as to how un-fun a larger project could be.

PHPTriad was a good example of a successful project that was closed because it became too much like work for the author. Matt Rosenberger pointed out the “Linux Router Project”:http://www.linuxrouter.org/#news as another project with a similar end.

So, what is the future of open source projects? How can we put the fun back into them? I guess making them exclusively for geeks would help so you don’t have to do any hand holding…!