> You might want more contributors (that can fun). But you don't really want more users who don't contribute back. IMO this is a huge problem for user facing a

> You might want more contributors (that can fun). But you don't really want more users who don't contribute back. IMO this is a huge problem for user facing applications (e.g. desktop applications like gimp). They have great appeal to fairly non-technical users which creates a huge support load and they often have complex internals which appears to repel many first time contributors. I know I've been watching projects like LMMS (a music creation environment) for years and it seems like a constant struggle to keep enough contributors such that the support load doesn't burn out everyone involved. I don't know that avoiding marketing is the solution here since that just would mean that commercial alternatives would evolve quickly while the project would die off due to a lack of new contributors, though it might be one of the tools to change the contributor:support ratio.