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