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Thomas, That's why I added in 'user' to the community. If there is an active communication medium with one or two developers communicating with the user community than there is health there. So I always say to look at the developer & user community to make sure it's active as one of the gauges of the health of an open source product. Nicole On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Thomas Krichel <[log in to unmask]> 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 >