My main open source project is http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net and during typical development I wouldn't say that I had promoted it too much

My main open source project is http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net and during typical development I wouldn't say that I had promoted it too much. Within the past year or so I did end up doing some fundraising for the project which did turn into a marketing heavy endeavor (videos/marketing only email lists/update posts targeting users/long replies to email or forums/etc). Some of the marketing emails were fun to show off new features, but they did eat a fair amount of time when they were coming out at a reasonable pace. Outside of that one time period the application receives most of its marketing from independent interested users and release announcements. per the questions: > 1) why did you start it? I took over as a maintainer when I wanted to use the application and bugs/missing features were an issue (IIRC it was without a maintainer for ~3 years). > 2) how did people find it? Originally the project was marketed via mailing lists/forums/blogs/software review sites/early youtube or pre-youtube videos/etc. After a few years it ended up being presented in an open source community conference. Currently a fair amount of web traffic comes from a few freeware review sites in addition to the general linux community which is spread over a larger variety of sites (and more difficult to pinpoint as most users are going to obtain copies from their package manager rather than the website). > 3) did you post it somewhere to get traction? The releases are posted to 2 forums, 2 mailing lists. It's original release was only posted to a single audio based mailing list (AFAIK). When working on fundraising bits were posted to 2 different other mailing lists and information was provided to 3 software review sites, one of which posted the information provided. > 4) do you think it's unfair to just work on something you like but never take the time to get the word out? Nope. You're spending your time working on something. If your goals align with having other people utilize your work, then by all means talk about it, otherwise there's no problem whatsoever with keeping it to yourself. Also consider that marketing for contributors and marketing for users are two (sometimes different) activities.