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On The Health Of Open Source Projects
time to read 1 min | 140 words
Last night at the OSS panel, it was asked what are the indicators for a healthy OSS project. In my opinion, it is the size of the community and the number of active committers.
A good example of a project that wasn't healthy is NDoc, when the lead (single?) developer left, the project was mostly stranded, and the community basically died around it. A good example of a healthy OSS project is Castle, where we currently have ~20 active committers, and a very active community.
By the way, by this metric, Rhino Mocks is not a healthy project, which also came up yesterday, if I happen to meet a Bus somehow, I am not sure that the project will continue, even though there are a large number of people using it.
Comments
I agree that active committers is a sign of health for an open source project and that NDoc wasn't healthy. From my understanding of the fiasco, a contributing factor to its demise was the lack of an updated public source repository. It is my understanding that much work had gone into supporting generics that wasn't checked in and when the lead developer quit in disgust (which I can understand given the circumstances), those revisions went with him. Hence anyone picking up the project had to learn the source code, re-implement a bunch of stuff, AND potentially deal with some pretty nasty emails/threats now directed at them. I honestly considered picking up the project when it was abandoned, but decided it wasn't worth the potential grief. Besides Sandcastle (even with all its flaws) was going to win in the end because it was free and from Microsoft.
Tools like Rhino Mocks are different. The public source repository is up to date. The test suite is awesome, which means I can (and did) make changes without fear of horribly breaking something. I also use the tool every day.
So active committers is only one sign of health for an open source project. A bigger one, IMHO, is how much pain do your users experience when you get hit by the bus. Is it enough for one (or more) of them to step in and take over the project?
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