There are many open source projects who are basically one-man shows (SQLAlchemy springs to mind -- it recently reached 1.0 after 9 years of intensive hacking) w

There are many open source projects who are basically one-man shows (SQLAlchemy springs to mind -- it recently reached 1.0 after 9 years of intensive hacking) which survive just fine. I agree that having an active community helps, but being the main author of an open source project myself, I feel that the real reason a project survives is because its authors' lives depend on it :)