Small open source projects are increasingly becoming unsustainable. Why am I saying this? Well, we have to understand the motivation behind many of the smaller open source projects. A part of them started as one-man commercial projects that proved unmaintainable for lack of time or simply unprofitable (AdminTool, ScreenWeaver). On the other hand there are some stub projects that were contributed by few people, people who are currently too busy to work on such projects (AMFPHP, ASDT).

The people that work on these open source projects are generally involved in the community are rather well known, and unknowns can become geek-famous super fast through positive publicity (think Nicolas Canasse for example). Thus the people working on these small open source projects are either already well-known, busy developers or talented developers that are new to the field but will be ‘discovered’ sooner or later through or small, gossipy community. Soon enough these freelancers become swamped in work and valuable projects are abandoned for lack of time. this is especially true in Flash development where RIA is a small niche where reputations spread quickly and talent is sorely missing.

So while it’s cool to see a bunch of projects opening up recently, I’m afraid that at this time that they will be hard to sustain. Larger open-source projects have paid employees behind them (Mozilla for example). I believe that this also may be the way to go for smaller open source projects. If we could accumulate, say, 10 grand, we could hire a couple of talented junior developers for a few months on the cheap to finish a bunch of stub projects that would benefit everyone: ASDT, Screenweaver, AdminTool, any project that financial contributors see as deserving development time. I would be willing to personally to donate the (still not bought yet) Captivate license and the rest of the accumulated money (a little over 250$ as of late) from the AMFPHP fund to get something along those lines started. Of course, we would need the support of not only individual donors but also from corporate users of Flash open source software?

What do you think? Can it fly?