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Something I tried to write about in my article in LJ, is, yes, every project needs to start somewhere. But you need to evaluate your own capacity, and compare that against the maturity of the software and the community. You need more internal capacity to deal with immature software with an immature community. Now, if there weren't those who had that that willingness to take risks, had that capacity, and were willing to apply it to a new project -- then we'd never get mature projects, indeed. But it's not necessarily the right decision for everyone. It requires capacity and a willingness to be a developer, not just an end user. Which is of course a spectrum, and ideally no user of collaborative open source is 'just' an end user, but some are more towards the 'developer' end than others. You need to evaluate your own capacity and measure it against where the project you are considering is at. No individual software is right or wrong for everyone universally, it depends on the context. I tried to write about some of this stuff at more length (among other issues) in this article: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6611591.html Jonathan Thomas Krichel wrote: > Brett Bonfield writes > > >> I think Jonathan and Nicole nailed it with community health, >> > > I beg to differ. > > If you requiree a healthy community to start working with a piece of > software, how do you want a grassroots project to start? Obviously a > small project will start with one or two developers, and it won't > grow, until a few people work with it despite the fact that it's a > small thing to start with. > > Requiring an upfront healthy community is particurly problematic is > a small community such as digital library work. > > On the other kind, there is widely adopted software that I got > cajoled into maintaining, that consider bad. Apache is one of > them. I run maybe 50 virtual servers an a bunch of boxes, I am still > puzzled how it works and it's trial and error with each software > upgrade, where goes that NameVirtualServer thing into, the constant > croaks "server foo has no virtualserver". I'm not a dunce, but > Apache makes me feel I am one. When I look at these config files > that are half-baked XML, I wonder what weed the guy smoked who > invented this. > > If I could do it allover again, I would do it in lighttpd. Oh well > it was not there in 1995 where I started running web servers. > > Other problematic case: Mailman. I run about 130 mailing lists, over > 80 have a non-standard config, I am running every few months into > problems with onne of them, despite the fact that I wrote a script > to configure all the non-standard lists the same way. > > > Cheers, > > Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel > http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1 > skype: thomaskrichel > >