Many open source projects tend to grow because of passion, exploration, and having fun. Can't really say the same thing when it comes to .NET or Java. If we g

Many open source projects tend to grow because of passion, exploration, and having fun. Can't really say the same thing when it comes to .NET or Java. If we go back to the early 1996-2003, when the web was still "young", there are plenty Perl/CGI or PHP open source project to explore the capability of the web. Having said that, if you look at the tools the era produced, are mostly Forum, Blog, CMS for niche market (games, anime, manga, etc). People were having fun. If we go back even further during the 1980-1995 during the UNIX, Linux era, people were writing command-line tools to explore the OS and writing X11 desktop app for fun. Move forward to today's open source project: SugarCRM, Drupal (semi-serious), osCommerce, Magento, Maven, Ant, Cassandra. They're less fun. They tend to be more serious and "Ready for Business". Sometime I wish I was old enough to be in the 1980-1990 era. Unfortunately I was not even in an egg-shaped form yet.