The Death of Concord

I just got a note from SourceForge that as of the end of this week the Concord project will be removed.

If you haven't heard of Concord, well, there is a good reason for that. It was a noble idea, but never got much farther than that. The idea was an open-source ColdFusion shopping cart.  It caused a fair amount of discussion on CF-Talk at its inception and spawned a project listing on SourceForge. The project had discussion on the direction of Concord for a week or so.

Then activity on the project faded pretty quickly. It had some discussion about how things should be, but nothing ever got done.

This certainly isn't the first open source project that I have seen fail in this way. So what happened? Why do some projects fail and others flourish?

I don't know, but I do have a theory. One criticism that I have often seen of open-source is that it is a sort of Communism and Communism tends not to be successful on a large scale. I think this criticism is actually inaccurate. It is true that contributors to open-source projects receive no direct financial compensation for their work. It isn't true that they receive no benefit.

When I am asked why I put so much effort into my open-source projects (DataMgr, CodeCop, sebtags), I generally either spin positive (to contribute to the community) or negative (my desire to be respected). Certainly both are true. More true then that, I just enjoy working on those projects.

It is also true that I do so because I expect the work to benefit me. If I can make some successful open-source projects, I can increase the degree to which I am recognized in the community. This helps make sure that more people know who I am and might want to send work my way if my work-load declines or might be willing to hire me if I decide to give up on self-employment.

This is where the "Communist" criticism fails. To some degree, I do expect to benefit from my work (even if not financially).

The "Communist" criticism does apply, however, to open-source projects started by a large group. In that environment, as in Communism, everyone involved stands to benefit equally regardless of their individual contributions.

Certainly, I concentrated my "open-source time" on my own projects - hoping others would give me direction for my contributions to Concord. I suspect others did the same.

For my part, I suspect that will be the last group-run open-source project I will sign up for. None have worked so far. If you want an open-source ColdFusion shopping cart, probably better to build it yourself before you ask for help.