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Just building what you want and publishing it doesn't work anymore. Look at the countless projects wilting away because the "community" actively ignores them an

by zo1 2y ago

Just building what you want and publishing it doesn't work anymore. Look at the countless projects wilting away because the "community" actively ignores them and the huge volume of content doesn't target those projects anymore. No tutorials, no guides, no evangelists, no Github stars and forks, no Twitter promoters, no fancy shmancy *.io domain and interactive Docs with oodles of integrations with everything under the sun means that your project will languish in ignored obscurity. Two big-ish projects getting that treatment that I've personally witnessed happening in slow-motion over many years: Tornado and Knockout.js.

zdware 2y ago
Languishing in ignored obscurity is fine for the stuff I open source. There's no expectations but it's not hidden from anyone either.
saghm 2y ago
I think there's a difference of opinion here about what it means for it to "work". The point I infer from the parent comment (which I happen to agree with) is that measuring success or failure in terms of the community is orthogonal to open source. If what you want is a successful community, then it makes sense to base your decision on whether to be open source or not on that, but failing to build a long-lasting community isn't a failure of open source itself but at using it as a tool to try to achieve a specific goal, and not everyone doing open source shares that goal. As an aside, I think it's worth noting that most attempts to build long-lasting, vibrant communities for software fail, regardless of whether they're open source or not. Open source might not have a high success rate of community-building, but neither does proprietary software (or whatever middle ground you consider to be in the space between those terms, like "open core" or "source available"). If what you care about most is building a large community, the more effective choice probably depends on a lot of factors specific to what you're building and what else is going on at the time you're trying than something as simple as "always be open source" or "always be proprietary".

by zo1 2y ago

zdware 2y ago

Languishing in ignored obscurity is fine for the stuff I open source. There's no expectations but it's not hidden from anyone either.

saghm 2y ago

I think there's a difference of opinion here about what it means for it to "work". The point I infer from the parent comment (which I happen to agree with) is that measuring success or failure in terms of the community is orthogonal to open source. If what you want is a successful community, then it makes sense to base your decision on whether to be open source or not on that, but failing to build a long-lasting community isn't a failure of open source itself but at using it as a tool to try to achieve a specific goal, and not everyone doing open source shares that goal. As an aside, I think it's worth noting that most attempts to build long-lasting, vibrant communities for software fail, regardless of whether they're open source or not. Open source might not have a high success rate of community-building, but neither does proprietary software (or whatever middle ground you consider to be in the space between those terms, like "open core" or "source available"). If what you care about most is building a large community, the more effective choice probably depends on a lot of factors specific to what you're building and what else is going on at the time you're trying than something as simple as "always be open source" or "always be proprietary".