Wow, it almost raises the question; “Are some projects too small to continue with?” Yes, that may seem harsh, but the logic is there still, I think.

Small open source projects are increasingly becoming unsustainable. Why am I saying this? Well, we have to understand the motivation behind many of the smaller open source projects. A part of them started as one-man commercial projects that proved unmaintainable for lack of time or simply unprofitable (AdminTool, ScreenWeaver). On the other hand there are some stub projects that were contrinbuted by few people, people who are currently too busy to work on such projects (AMFPHP, ASDT).

The people that work on these open source projects are generally involved in the community are rather well known, and unknowns can become geek-famous super fast through positive publicity (think Nicolas Canasse for example). Thus the people workign on these small open source projects are either alr4eady well-known, busy developers or talented developers that are new to the field but will be ‘discovered’ sooner or later through or small, gossipy community. Soon enough these freelancers become swamped in work and valuable projects are abandoned for lack of time. this is especially true in Flash development where RIA is a small niche where reputations spread quickly and talent is sorely missing. [Read the rest]