Hi,
Our IT industry also has not changed in the last 60 years of
existence. We still are doing testing, maintenance,
service projects. Training and education is not being attended to.
That is also full of mediocrity.
In order to capitalize on an open source project, to make it popular,
to make it a success, as in get lot of downloads,
users, queries, and occasion projects/money a certain set of rules
have to be followed.
A project takes time to take off.
This is not surprising.
My LiveUSB OpenBSD project has been around for 4 years and more.
And I slowly started adding to it, improving it and what I started as
a fun project has now started earning money
for me. But that is not something to speak of.
I know I have more to do.
I run close to 15 open source projects today but I never get any
traction from around 12 of them.
I started them recently and I think I myself did not pay attention to
it or use it myself to add the excellence angle to it.
And the rules I find are:
1) You have to create something unique and that fills a need. This is
true to succeed in biz. You can sell karivepilai in
Germany since you won't get it there. So import it from India, take
care of stocking it and sell it by paying for shop space.
2) You have to create unique content, unique code, something different
from what already is available which means
you should be creative and be good at it. You should be doing
something interesting and better than what people
making 40L a year in Indian IT industry, globe trotting and meeting
customers are doing. You should be a good
programmer.
3) From the values standpoint you should not shrink at sharing away
for free. Nature will force it from you if you don't
do it yourself. Moreover that will certainly do a lot of marketing
which is essential for promoting yourself in case you
are not interested in marketing your initiative or biz
4) Few more values like responsiveness, continuous improvement,
staying technically focused and understanding
the technology landscape also matter. These are really not values,
these go into the skill region. But normally you find
that skill comes only after the right values are there.
Best of luck with open source project development.
Also sourceforge is a remarkably well managed organized way to promote
open source.
-Girish
--
Gayatri Hitech
http://gayatri-hitech.com
