Oh well, the thread in OpenICC mailing list about Elektra is growing into articulating all sorts of amusing misconceptions about public, private and dead projects.
You know, I’ve been spending an awful lot of time exploring various projects in the past years and I’ve got something to say about common mistakes developers do. So here comes the first post on the topic. The whole series is going to be harsh; at some point you might find yourself swearing in presence of kids. Be careful about that — they might point out grammar and spelling mistakes 
The way to start this posting would be definition of terminology. Unfortunately this is possible only for “private project”, because definition of a dead project is oh so much controversial. So let’s go with “private” first.
Some likely definitions for a private project would be:
- a project whose developers do not intend to gain public interest
- a project that exists to satisfy one’s urge to experiment or to solve a private task
- an in-house project
With these definitions in mind, you can visit a website of a private project only by coincidence. Even so, you are not supposed to discover any bold statements, right? Whereas with Elektra you see an attempt at unification of UNIX configuration systems. That’s rather bold for a private project, no? And what you see next is total absence of visible activity.
There is one very popular mistake a lot of free software developers do. They release source code and think it’s enough to get the ball rolling. Well, it’s not and I’m not sorry to tell you that. When your goal is to create a successful project, you have to think of many more things:
- documentation for both developers and users
- regularly posting updates on the state of things
- building a strong community
That’s at the very least. And guess what — very few developers want to do that and/or are good at that. What developers really want to do is to actually work on their project, because this is what they are good at.
In my opinion everyone should be spending time mostly on things that are fun to do. So it’s pointless to criticize a software developer for not being strong community leader or a top class journalist, but it is right to criticize him/her for not attempting to build a team that covers all angles.
You’d be amazed how many important free software projects have websites that barely get updated and what kind of rumors are given life because of lack of information on the subject.
How much of that relates to small projects? A lot.
Tell me, what is the point of a private open source project, be it small or large? You apply GPL or a GPL-like license, because you want modifications go back to you to improve your mainstream code. Free open source software is really rather pragmatical. So if you are not even making an effort of telling people, if the project is alive, you might as well change license to proprietary or put a big lock on the website and tell everyone to stay out.
In the next postings I’m going to further treacherously bully smalls projects cover things like writing news and working with communities. Watch out