Community Involvement for an Open Source Project?

pfleming asks: "Several months ago I began a maintenance fork of some niche software. Essentially, these are PHP/MySQL scripts for real estate offices. The original developer moved on to an incompatible version to what I was using. Upgrading for me and many other users was not the easiest option. Luckily the software is GPL'd and so continued work on the fork is not a big deal. I have set up a site, made it available for download, announced the availability of the fork on Freshmeat and the forums for the original software. Now I have a few people subscribed to the project on Freshmeat, and a few on a mailman list set up for the project. This project has been listed on the GNU Website and other mirror sites but doesn't get much discussion on the mailman list and nothing from the Freshmeat subscribers. There is usually an increase in interest (indicated by a short term increase in site hits) when new releases are announced but this fades back to regular traffic of ~40 visits per day as measured by webalizer after a short period of time. Is this an anomaly? Should I be thankful that there aren't tons of bug reports and feature requests?"

"More questions for you to chew on:

• Is there more interest in a new project vs. one that is more or less mature?
• Is the project too narrow to attract an audience?
• Could the underlying business (real estate) just be too saturated with web sites?

Just what are the secrets to a successful (measured by lots of contributors, etc) project...or am I just not defining success correctly?

What other thoughts does Slashdot have on this subject?"

My 2 cents

There is usually an increase in interest (indicated by a short term increase in site hits) when new releases are announced but this fades back to regular traffic of ~40 visits per day as measured by webalizer after a short period of time. Is this an anomaly?

This seems pretty normal. Any time you make an announcement on your project (including releases) you are going to drive traffic to its web site (that's why corporations pump out press releases). The fact that it dies down afterwards is totally normal, you'd expect people to come, see what's going on, download the stuff and leave.

Should I be thankful that there aren't tons of bug reports and feature requests?

Probably not. This might be an indication that the software is wonderful, but it's more likely an indication that the user base is small. As the user base increases they are going to find all sorts of weird problems (especially with different machine/OS configurations) which will get reported as bugs.

Is there more interest in a new project vs. one that is more or less mature?

I don't think new vs. old is as important as good vs. bad. If your project is useful and well executed then you'll get hits. Just compare Mozilla with any of the thousands of "new" projects listed on SourceForge.

Is the project too narrow to attract an audience?

I doubt that. Real Estate is a massive business world wide.

Could the underlying business (real estate) just be too saturated with web sites?

That's possible in any business, if your project had some uniqueness then the saturation will not be important. Getting the message out about your feature set will.

Just what are the secrets to a successful (measured by lots of contributors, etc) project...or am I just not defining success correctly?

I don't think number of contributors is the most important measure. How about number of people actually using the software? In POPFile there's a feature where it can report back (opt in) that it's being used, this gives me an idea of how many downloads converted into users. Another measure of success would be mentions of your project in the press.

John.

Re:My 2 cents

I doubt that. Real Estate is a massive business world wide.

Yeah but how many Real Estate agents read Freshmeat? Even if the Read Estate industry is massive (and it is), this guys market is much smaller unless he gets the word out to the general public, which involves spending lots of money on advertising... Which is, of course, silly to do for a free project.

Re:My 2 cents

Even if the Read Estate industry is massive (and it is), this guys market is much smaller unless he gets the word out to the general public, which involves spending lots of money on advertising...

Word of mouth is far more powerful than advertising. What the guy needs to do is get a few RE offices up and running with the software and get those RE agents to talk to others about it. In addition there are specialist RE web sites where RE agents could discuss the project and hence get more coverage of his project.

John.

Even more important

What the guy needs to do is get a few RE offices up and running with the software and get those RE agents to talk to others about it. In addition there are specialist RE web sites where RE agents could discuss the project and hence get more coverage of his project

Yes, but the important part here is that by helping other people impliment this you *will* discover quirks/bugs/out-of-spec behavior in your project. The quality will improve greatly and you will soon have another, better release ;-) Then when the next people try it they will have an easier time :-)

Re:My 2 cents

spending lots of money on advertising... Which is, of course, silly to do for a free project

Yep, I'm learning this. But not for the reasons you think. Try advertising a free project using Google's adwords. They'll kill the ad, asking you to substantiate the claim that the software is free. However, they don't actually give you any method to substantiate the claim -- they only give you the option to change the ad! I tried replying via email (never read/responded to) and even adding text to my Web site to note that the project was under a BSD license. No response, no way to undo their block.

Hmm. Now that I'm ranting about it, I think I'll change the ad text from "free" to "open source" and see if they block that. Fewer people will understand it, but a gimped ad is better than none, I guess.

Surprising

Essentially, these are PHP/MySQL scripts for real estate offices. [...] ~40 visits per day as measured by webalizer after a short period of time. Is this an anomaly?

No. Because they are PHP/MySQL scripts for real estate offices. Calculate number of real estate offices in the US. Substract those that have a meaningful IT infrastructure beyond a few PCs to type and print contracts. Then substract those that use custom software. Then substract those that don't use an Office/VBA solution, or simply a Microsoft platform (and from my experience those are the majority). Then substract those that have actual in-house developers. Finally, substract those that use PHP and MySQL, specifically. Then add the number of people who create and sell software solutions for real estate offices based on PHP/MySQL. There you go, about 40 people.

If you are Apache, Perl, Python, GAIM, etc, etc. then yes, it's an anomaly. What you're seeing is about right, considering it's a pretty narrow niche. People won't get excited about something just because it's listed on FreshMeat and is GPLE'd. There are one-liner bash scripts there with wider audience than your code.

But I don't see what you're worried about - that's how it works. The fact that its released will eventually help someone out. Just don't expect Yahoo-sized traffic.

Re:Surprising

No offense intended to the author, but quite frankly, I'm shocked something like this would get 40 hits a day. I mean, this is pretty much the definition of "obscure program".

Re:Surprising

40 hits a day adds up after a while. Lots of people will wait for a bit more content in the forums/message boards before they try a new project. These are folks that want to be sure that the project doesn't die in 6 months or are looking for documentation. Unless the project is truly groundbreaking, 40 hits a day is respectable if they are 40 downloads of the project. A years worth of 40 hit days is 14,600 hits.

If you'd like to generate more of a user base here are a few ideas to try:

Cross post it to popular freeware sites and real estate sites. Remember that most freeware sites would rather have a link to the file than the actual file, so you don't need to worry about obsolete versions floating around out there.

You can also submit it to be reviewed somewhere (which can be a risk of it's own). When it gets reviewed, submit an announcement of the review to various real estate and PHP/MySQL news sites.

Write a HowTo for your project or find a user to write one and post it to the appropriate HowTo sites.

Post news on your site on a regular basis, like at least once a week. If you have to, set a schedule for news posts and post anything to keep with your schedule - even if it's just a "Nothing new, but updates to come - Here's what I'm working on" post. Sometimes a user will suggest something in response to a "Status" news item that will help you as you are developing. Be sure to publicly thank contributing users like that. It's an incentive for other users to speak openly and conrtibute ideas, if anything.

Whatever you do, don't be afraid to play the PR game. It may sound odd, but keeping the users engaged/entertained can go a long way.

Re:Surprising

No. Because they are PHP/MySQL scripts for real estate offices. Calculate number of real estate offices in the US. Substract those that have a meaningful IT infrastructure beyond a few PCs to type and print contracts.

No kidding. The fact is that big shops will write their own (or implement a large CRM, or...), while the small shops will follow the path of least resistance (like not doing computer-based anything, or keeping it to a minimum). Your best bet would be to set up an ASP (Application Service Provider) to host their data so they can get at it over the web, or set up appliance machines to do this task (or both).

This is one case where GPLed software has little value by itself (because there's few people to implement it in its target market), but you could add lots of value by implementing it (and make money in the process).

Re:Surprising

Have you ever been in your average Realestate office? Forget not having an IT department they generaly have one or two Computer Pro's that still think AOL is the next best thing to sliced bread but have figured out how to play sneaker net and attach things to email along with a reboot here and there. Often the recptionist is dual duty with helping with the computers and filing the weekly advertisements. This is not exactly a high tech business. MPLS listings are considered high tech and having a shared printer is cutting edge. BTW this is from persoanl expeieince with the Ravis (a moderatly large realestate company) and a lot of locals.

If you wanted traffic

you should've linked directly to your project from the slashdot post. (We all know that slashdot is really just a front for the real estate mafia.)

Re:If you wanted traffic

I'll give you the Jakob Nielsen-approved end user stream of conciousness surf through your site...

I started on www.rwcinc.net/freerealty, which I at first thought was a news page but later figured out was a sort of changelog / download page. I had a look around for install instructions thinking I might do a test install, but couldn't find any on the page.

Looking for an overview I next clicked on 'upcoming features', but found it to be a bit developer specific. (As in I would grok it if I were familiar with the source but couldn't infer much about the software as a casual visitor, except that it uses images and a db).

After that I tried 'about this server' (thinking perhaps that the software was somehow server related, or that it needed to run on top of a specific server setup). For about half a second I thought I was looking at the system requirements for the software, then I realised it was a actually a blurb about the machine serving the website.

Next I tried 'demo site', thinking I could perhaps find a demo version of the software alongside install instructions. I stared at the page blankly for a bit then finally figured out that the software was some type of content management thingy for real estate listings.

Suggestions:

• Add an FAQ ('what is FR', 'who is FR aimed at', 'what's the difference between FR and OpenRealty', 'how do I get the latest version', 'how do I install', 'what are system requirements' etc)
• Change the wording 'demo site' to something like 'view a sample site powered by FreeRealty'
• Maybe have a plain English analogue of 'upcoming features' ('in 2.9 you [the end user] will be able to do x, y, and z')

I feel like the archetypal clueless user after all that. It's nice to see someone caring about the usability of their site, though, so it's work the loss of geek points.

look at samba-tng versus samba

Samba-tng forked off of samba quite a while ago. The user base using tng is still very small. There is a flurry of people checking it out each time a new release comes out (Which lately has been due to security problems in both code bases).

The user lists are fairly slow, and there are a few developers on the dev lists. The development is still highly active, but the purpose of TNG isn't as important to most people as the functionality and features of Samba it self. The people who need to the changes made in TNG, will go to TNG. However, the vast majority of people don't need anything beyond what the base Samba 2.x or 3.x code has.

Then again.. I would also say, most people haven't checked out the rad features included in rpcclient with tng.. which makes pen testing windows extremely easy.. Oh wait, so does dcom. :)

Be thankful

Should I be thankful that there aren't tons of bug reports and feature requests?

Yes, you should be. And, you should be thankful that SCO hasn't gotten a hold of your code yet...

Project web site

It seems likely that the project is Free Realty [freshmeat.net].

John.

Re:Project web site

Perhaps... I think it was my project OpenRealty [jonroig.com] that got forked. (Not that I mind... working full time, I didn't have any time to support it -- one of the reasons it was GPL.)

For whatever it's worth, we're unifying as many of the branches as we can right now at www.open-realty.org [open-realty.org]. See my announcment on my site [jonroig.com]...

Link to the mentioned project

For those interested, here's the link to the Free Realty [rwcinc.net] project.

You forked.

The majority of user base propably upgraded to the incompatible version. People simply may not need your fork, but it's always a good thing to have for those who need it (40 people is quite a lot IMHO for a real estate open source software :))

Not surprising at all

I help develop and maintain a project [sf.net] for computational structural biology, and our project stats look pretty similar to yours. We release, see an interest spike, then it dies down.

Factor in that you're in a very niche market -- real estate offices who have the need for a dedicated software package, who know enough about computers to use Linux/PHP/Apache, and who don't have in-house developers. Then, consider that you're not actually maintaining the original project, but a project that branched from the original so that users won't have to upgrade. It doesn't leave many interested users.

This is part of the justification behind "release early, release often" -- the more you release, the more hits you generate, and the more likely you are to find interested users. All the same, don't expect to get the hits of the next big RPG platform or internet chat application. The users just aren't there.

Ask Slashdot (abridged version)

I wrote some SQL scripts and noone has clicked my pay pal link. What am I doing wrong?

Promotion

You have to let people know the project exists. Simply listing it on freshmeat won't get you much, as I know (I've listed a couple [kimbly.com] of projects [kimbly.com] there). My site gets practically zero traffic from those listings.

There are a couple things I've found that help. First, find a discussion group focused on a subject relevant to your project, and mention it occasionally when it becomes relevant to the discussion -- this gets you kickstarted, but it's not a long-term solution. Second, you might start some kind of blog [kimbly.com] on the site, so that people have a reason to follow your progress. Rant about the state of the real estate market or something. This is the long-term solution.

I've done both of these things, and eventually they get you a lot more traffic than freshmeat ever will. The more traffic you get, the more likely that someone will link to your site, which will raise your google ranking, which increases the amount of traffic you get, which starts the whole feedback loop all over again. You just need to focus on making sure that your visitors have a reason to link you once they're there.

The other canned meat.

You can just spam it maybe you will get 6000 ideas for a product that does actually works. Or a new hate club whatever comes first. ;-)

Instant webtraffic....

well i'm sure you'll have more hits than you ever imagined now.... Go slashdotting affect (or is it effect?)

It's like an engine

I too maintain niche projects, some bigger than others, some more popular than others. Here's how I understand the dynamics of a community around a projects. You have 3 cases :

1) your project is too specialized, you have a smallish community of people who use it, few bug reports now and then, and you end up doing all the work on your project.

2) your project is interesting enough that the community around it grows to a point where most of the improvements come from patches, bug reports ... i.e. bits of work done not by you, but you still end up integrating the changes and act as the only maintainer of the project.

3) your project is very interesting and the community around it grows exponentially. The improvements / bug reports flood you and, essentially, your own bandwidth is not enough to maintain the project. You have to delegate and trust other people, in which case A) you're a shitty project manager and someone else who has that talent eventually makes a code fork and takes it over, or B) you become a successful OSS project maintainer, the extreme case of which, for example, is Linus.

The added fun is that, if you code well while you start the project, it can go from a shitty thing to something of interest, just because the look-n-feel that detracted people from trying it before now attracts more people. That's where all the interest is, see how you can "prime the pump" and build a community around your ideas by doing the initial work, then watch the improvements come already made.

I personally choose to create/maintain projects that I reckon will fall in or near category 2), because I don't want to maintain big projects anymore, with the flood of patches, suggestions and hate mail that comes with it, but I don't want to end up having my name associated with a shitty tarball that nobody cares about either.

The Tipping Point

There's that book out there called 'The Tipping Point' which might be of some interest to you. Never read it myself, but from what I've heard about it, it tries to explain why some things go on to be phenomenonally successful (like Levis jeans) while other things fade into obscurity.

As for being thankful about not having bugs and feature requests, well I suppose it depends on your outlook. I can imagine you're the only person who can answer it you. Coding for your own sake? Then it's probably good, you can set your own direction without any monkeys on your back. If you're coding for the glory, well, perhaps a broader choice of topic might help. ;)

Simple.

It's simple. People are poor. They are working to feed their families now. Nobody is interested in coding for free. Mod me down, but it's the fucking truth. The only people writing code for free these days are insanely wealthy introverts (few and far between) and the few college kids that are still supported by mommy and daddy, who also have the attention span of a gnat.

Re:Simple.

Well, that was a blindingly generalised statement wasn't it.

I am neither hugely wealthy, nor am I some bored college student. I am work five days a week and have a wife and kids and yet I am developing my own project under the GPL.

The reasons people write Open Source software vary greatly from having an itch to scratch to altruism to sticking it to the man.

My experience with real estate software.

A month ago I did a whole bunch of work for a real estate agent in his home office, making hardware and software upgrades, etc. I have seen the multi-listing and real-estate specific database software that they are using, and while based on some ancient code, it was very powerful, very polished and good, and from what I gather, the software from this company is quite entrenched in the real estate business.

I installed and setup systems using Agent Office/Online Agent and for the Lightning 2000 mls service, which essentially seems to be a very fancy terminal emulator. screenshots here [homeseekerssoftware.com] They have been buying software from this company for FOURTEEN YEARS. You're competing against some big guns I think. The best thing you've got going for you is that these softwares are quite expensive, due to the fact that they are niche softwares, and that there is a lot of money in real estate. If you can offer a better real-estate -specific database at a lower price, maybe you can compete, but it had better convert and import the database they already have.

The Gwydion Dylan experience

The Gwydion Dylan [gwydiondylan.org] project (and Dylan language as a whole) has always had trouble gaining a significant user base. Gwydion Dylan is an open-source optimizing compiler for the Dylan programming language. It was originally developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, but is now maintained (and extended) by a small group of volunteers.

Dylan is a wonderful, elegant, extensible language that really puts Java to shame. Usually when there's a programming language article on slashdot, people end up describing their dream language... and it usually what they describe matches Dylan quite well. But still it's very hard to attract new programmers to the language.

It's a great compiler, and a team using it earned second place in the 2001 ICFP Programming Contest. The compiler is still being improved, but in all honestly, there's just a few dedicated volunteers working on it.

I don't know how to explain it's lack of "success", except to note that few geeks are really geeky enough to stray away from the mainstream languages.

Re:The Gwydion Dylan experience

It's probably the name, honestly.

Do you wanna know the first thing I thought of when I read the name?
Bob Dylan.
I then thought "old" almost instinctually.
I'm not putting it down, I'm just saying what I thought, and being honest.

Do you want buzz, or are you seeking hype?

Buzz is when other people say good things about you. Hype is when you try to inflate activity by going about it yourself.

I prefer buzz. My own software projects are posted on my web servers and have plenty to offer to those who find them. Someone eventually wanders by, sees it, likes it, then mentions it to someone else. Many of these mentions happen on Usenet or mailing lists that get archived. Now people searching for certain terms will find those posts that link to me.

Eventually, people who run directories like dmoz will get a hold of it and index it somewhere. This will get even more people coming by. Over time, you'll build a base of users who have it installed and stop by once in awhile to see what's new. Having a moderated mailing list that does nothing but announce new releases helps a lot.

This is not an exaggeration. I have a project that's gone from rather small to pleasantly healthy in the space of about 5 years. To give you some idea of how long ago it was, I posted my one and only direct reference to it here on Slashdot before you had to log in. Back in those days you could just put in a name, u@h, and URL, and it would be attached to your post.

You also have to realize that some projects are not going to have a very large audience. Unless you happen to address the needs of many, don't expect a whole lot of activity. Those who find it will appreciate it, but the rest simply have no use for it. That's life.

By the way, you can probably get by without appearing on Freshmeat constantly. My own projects have only had a couple of announcements on there, all due to someone else. None of those people really stayed with it, so the last version is stuck at something from a year ago. I don't operate on the basis of updating other web sites, so it's not going to be maintained by me, either.

~googolplex

Well undoubtedly his hits are about to increase a tad bit...

Sounds like maintenance mode.

The original developer moved on to an incompatible version to what I was using. Upgrading for me and many other users was not the easiest option. (...) Should I be thankful that there aren't tons of bug reports and feature requests?"

Is it possible that the majority of your user base aren't really that interested in new features, but basicly want to keep the (well-working) system they have, just as you did? On the same note, isn't it also likely that those that are happy with the old product are also mostly the same that haven't been bitten by any major bugs?

To me, the situation seems pretty normal for a system that is in more or less "maintenance" mode. Now, the question is if that is what you want it to be, or do you want to start new development based on this platform? If it's the latter, you'd have to work rather intensely to argue for why going away from that system (to an incompatible one) was a poor decision. Many developing new features subscribe to the idea that to make an omelet, you need to break a few eggs...

Kjella

Marketing

Open Source, like anything other business, requires Marketing. You need to do market research, advertise your product, and most importantly, get customers.

Find out how to make money from your software. If you can't, is it a worthwhile hobby?

Finally, what is your business model? Are you going to be a consultant or sell the software or both?

If you're going to sell the software, consider moving to a different platform, like Java or .NET. PHP scripts are a hard sell. When Zend gets their act together and...

• Developes a stable (as in not breaking previous code with almost every release) platform
• Improves performance
• Makes it easier to interface your script with other applications

then PHP would be a good sell.

Well , thank you for not listing it in the article

Slashdot needs less shameless self promotion. Whether it be in the form of articles or shameless plugs for one's own tiny project embedded in a poster's sig, the shameless self-advertisement must stop!

Yes. I am kidding.

Open Source Myth

As people have remarked, and you yourself said, it's a niche market.

You often see people claim a benefit for OSS that it'll be bug-free because everyone can examine the source for bugs. (An even more extreme claim is that OSS will be more secure because it's been scoured for secruity problems, implying people are proactively inspection the software even when its not barfing on them.) What that claim overlooks, however, is that very few people will actually bother to do so. They could, in theory, but they won't, any more than if the source were closed.

It's niche software with few users. But of those users, even fewer are going to care about actually looking at the code. Most users have a problem to solve, and that doesn't include debugging your code. They just want to use the software.

And all the other developers aren't going to rush over to your project and start code inspecting it for you. They've got their own projects to do. The 40,000 people writing Yet Another Text Editor / Ide aren't going to drop everything and help you out, as it's not their current interest. So it doesn't matter than 40,000 developers could inspect your software; it won't actually happen just because your source is available.

Thus, you aren't going to get hits in proportion to the number of potential developers that could see your code. You're going to get hits in proportion to the number of actual users -- and you're going to get actual support from the fraction of those users that are (a) programmers and (b) have time to spare. For niche software, that will be small.

Large, popular, trendy, and crucial projects will get a lot of attention. Other projects won't particularly benefit just from slapping an OSS label on it and creating a freshmeat homepage. There's this notion that there's a huge pool of idle programmers just waiting for something to do on OSS; the reality is that there's a huge number of OSS projects just waiting for someone to do something with them.

What's most important

The most important thing is that it is useful to you.

I recently listed a project [freshmeat.net] on freshmeat as well as posted information to usenet newsgroups where some will find it relative and interesting to the newsgroup.

The description was edited by a freshmeat editor and could probably be written differently to attract a little more attention. But this project is not going to die, cause I won't let it... Cause it's useful to me, and that's the most important I can think of.

Usually...

projects smaller than "large" usually consist of one-three maintainers, some 3-4 "minor contributors" who supply hints, bug reports, small handy hacks and good ideas on irregular basis, several "fans" who look for updates, sometimes report bugs or help newcomers by answering questions, and besides that, small, regular flux of visitors who come, maybe ask a question or two, look, eventually download and go usually without ever saying thank you. I've seen that with several projects I participated in, as such "fan" or "minor contributor". From time to time some fan or minor contributor leaves, sometimes a new one finds it and stays. If the maintainer leaves the project though, it dies quite quickly, unless someone else decides to take over and continue the work. That doesn't happen often though.

Look at this from positive side. 1) 40 visitors a day, means maybe 1-4 new sites using your software. 2) No bug reports - probably no bugs so that's very good, isn't it? :) 3) No suggestions, ideas, patches - probably the design is so good that nobody feels need for these.

(of course it could be opposite, after first look people discard it and never think about it again, but... :)

One of good ideas to "exist" on the market is to package your stuff for some major distributions and try to include it - even if not in core of one, then at least in official software archives. So crazy people like me, who look through all packages dselect displays get to notice it :)

"Good Enough"

Most people don't want the best piece of software available for a problem. They want software which is good enough. Once they've found something which is good enough, they'll probably stay with it, even if better options become available.

To take a personal example, bsdiff [daemonology.net] is a tool for generating binary patches (in particular, for upgrading software). It is measurably and quantifiably better -- that is, it produces smaller patch files -- than any other software available, both free and commercial (eg, $2750/seat). Despite this, the only place where I'm aware of bsdiff being used is in another project of my own (FreeBSD Update). Most people found a tool which was "good enough" for their needs a long time ago, and aren't going to change now.

Either this is a lame promo

...to get more coders for this project, or it's to spur interest on LAMP projects for Real Estate.

Well anyway, if you really want to attract more attention to this project, here are some important things to consider:

Real estate people mostly don't get the free as in freedom of speech and/or free as in beer concepts.

Want to get their input? Sell the thing, it's still open source, and you're not going against the GPL and should be able to keep your pages at Freshmeat, GNU.org and SF (if you do have a project site there).

Know how to pimp your project... When targeting RE agents, showcase the commercial features... When targeting coders, showcase the technical features (like plugins/modules, themes, some sort of data extraction layer, etc. etc.)

Most importantly give incentive to people who contributed code/fixes.

Market Problem

The problem is really the market and the functionality that the software provides. Yes real estate is a huge market but it is dominated by two types of brokers: 1. Small brokers with less than 5 agents. 2. large offices with hundreds or thousands of agents.

The small offices usally get free or very cheap web sites that contain listings from the MLS's (that is that database where all listings in a market are stored). These people could be a potential market for you but they are not going to contribute anything to the cause either in code or money.

The large companies have the budget to put these sites together using a staff of developers and web designers. The developers and designers that create these sites might use your code as as starting point and may or may not contribute to the project.

The other problem is the functionality of the software. It is very easy and inexpensive to create a web site that displays property listings. What people need in the real estate industry is a system that will save them time and reduce the number of times they need to enter property information in to all their systems.

These types of systems are what my company creates and we have been talking about open sourcing our apps. Feel free to checkout our site and contact me if you are interested in working together on extending your product with more functionality. www.datixres.com [datixres.com]

Similar Situation

I've run into the same thing as you. I wrote an open source issue tracking system and didn't get a lot of feedback either. I've had about 12000 downloads over the past year but probably less than 20 real bug reports and even less feature requests. I've tried the freshmeat, sourceforge, google, and forum routes and it doesn't change much.

I'd love to find a good way to attract more user participation, mainly because I'd like to improve the product for my own use and I've found that other people tend to give me really good ideas for features, when they aren't bogged down in the actual coding like I am.

It is difficult to even get people to tell to drop by and "vote" in an online poll to tell me their environment so I know where to focus my efforts to get the most benefit to the community.

One good thing about writing my own software though is I'm much more likely to write to an author of an application I use to thank them, or drop by a forum and let them know I use it. Heck I'll even write bug reports now :)

another measure of success

"measure of success" is just a vague way of saying "what i want out of it". so dig deep into your psyche and figure out what you want. that's it.

for example, i am a programmer and usually what i want out of any collaborative project more than anything (more than users, more than fame, more than financial gain) is to find a fellow programmer who shares the vision of the project and has the comptetency and cycles to build upon the work. for me, the primary measure of success for a project is how well hackers (that i can respect) take to it. ymmv.

my own experiences...

are similar. I maintain a dictionary program for PalmOS devices (japanese/english, I think you can find it if you search - this is not about advertisments...), and it's mainly the same thing.

When there's a new version release, and I announce it on freshmeat, the site get's many hits, and that holds up for about a week.

I don't get much bug reports, either. By now the program is small, so there aren't many bugs to expect, but I think it depends very very much on the user base. Especially if all people are using similar environments you won't expect many errors you did not encounter. Most "bugs" are generated by different software versions in the environment, I think. Or don't you test it...? ;)

Sometimes there are people active on the mailing list, but mostly it's silent. But I don't worry about that, as the site gets about 30-100 hits/day, what means that people are watching the project.

Just don't worry and keep work up. Of course you could try to be more "aggressiv" to get user feedbacks, like putting a bigger "please mail me your experiences" in the INSTALL, but I don't think one can get much out of it.

As long as you get downloads, but don't get tons of bugreports, the people seem to be lucky with your program. And no one could be made to contribute...

Sourceforge statistics

I co-wrote a paper [cam.ac.uk] which tackles exactly this question by looking at Sourceforge download and page hit statistics. We found a Pareto (aka Power Law) distribution of activity with a bottom end cut-off of around a 200-400 hits per month, and a large population of dead projects with no accesses. It seems that there is a critical mass required to sustain a project, and you have it.

As far as "success" goes, you do need to define success before you can decide if you have it. There is no single definition. Only you can decide if your project is meeting the goals you have set for it. I'd say that if you have a user community, active development and a roadmap for the future then your project is successful. One of the implications of a Pareto distribution is that the vast majority of projects are "small" in terms of users, developers and activity. So don't think you have failed just because you are not mentioned in the same breath as Apache, Samba and the Linux Kernel.

Paul.

My guess (FWIW)

My guess is that very few programmers feel the need to write software for real estate companies. This means that the pool of "free" developers is very small.

The normal way around this is for companies to sponsor a developer part time. That way they get what the need worked on, instead of just whatever the programmers happen to feel like. (You encountered this problem when the original developer decided to change the file formats. Well, companies do this also, but since it's GPL, you have the option of continuing development. But this doesn't make finding the developer painless...particularly since now it's maintenance, not the most attractive of choices for a programmer.)

Perhaps the best choice would be to organize a "consortium" of real estate agencies that use this program and together hire someone to work on it. If there were 10 of you, each would only need to pay for 1/10 of a person to hire someone full time. The alternative would be to find some way to make it very interesting to someone. I think, however, that sponsoring a college student could be a good choice, if you can find the right student (a difficult problem, I admit).

Remember, GPL means libre, not gratis.

Success

Success is happiness. That is, if you're happy with your results, you're succeeding.

You don't have to measure your satisfaction with your project by any particular measure but the one that matters to you. If you want lots of users, go for it. If you just code for the love of coding, there you go - that's all you need.

Bear in mind that any fork is a bit political. Some users may feel a degree of loyalty to the original project, or may just not have heard of your fork.

Thank you.

Thanks for all the interesting and thoughtful comments. I see there are several areas that need work that either I overlooked or thought weren't as important as some of you said they were.
I originally didn't post the project url thinking that I would get more generalized and non biased opinions regarding my question. Not only did you look up the project in question, but even the original author (Jon Roig) spoke up regarding the current state of developement on the original branch.
I have also come to reconsider who my target market is. True, the project purports to be for real estate agents but I think it is more for the mini-IT departments supporting those agents. None of my own direct users have any knowlege of html,php, mysql, etc. They want to be able to edit/update listings and they want it to work.
The ability to change the look with skins or templates as suggested will probably be one of the non-essential upgrades that I will work on implementing.
Documentation and a potential rework of the project site are now on the table.
Again, thanks,

Re:Maybe it's you.

I don't know if you are a troll or not.
If you went to the version at open-realty.org great. Those guys are doing a pretty good job as well.

Already i've had the time to read many posts relating to this lament, however the author here still hasn't updated his site that something is going down with his shiz... I've now gone to openrealty and the offshoot program and it's quite cute.

So, I originally submitted this last Wed. One week ago. It took that long to be accepted for whatever reason. Did the site get slashed? I don't know. I didn't sit here clicking refresh for a week. It's possible that it slowed down, but I won't know that without skimming through the log files.
If the site wasn't totally killed then I think that is a fantastic testament to the value of LAMP on a little bitty server about my "server" [rwcinc.net]