Most open source projects start this way.
One solo developer who releases a piece of code to the community.
But what happens when the project grows and gains popularity ?
A software is a piece of art, of creativity, and is usually the developers litle baby, and I know that, I’ve released a few babies out in the wild.
Some of them are starting to grow and have it’s own live, I see people talking about them and in ways to integrate it with they platforms (like drupal, jelix and even joomla) and some users are contributing back to the project.
It’s quite rewarding to have a piece of code downloaded and used by thousands of developers around the world, but a few questions are starting to haunt me.
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Am I ready to let my baby grow ?
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Will I loose control of the project?
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Will I be a benevolent dictator or just plain mean?
I don’t know, but I’ve seen this happen a lot to open source projects controlled by one man.
Have you ever heard of CentOs?
This is a great example, it’s a project controlled by on man, and it seems he is afraid of loosing control, I can relate to that, but when you start accepting regular committers and having people helping the project on a regular basis you have taken the next step. Your are now a team leader, you have delegated some of your responsibilities to others.
When you do that, others become part of the project and want to have their saying, this is what is happening to CentOs, their committers and developers are threatening to leave because of their leader fear of shared management of the project.
Letting a project grow it’s a big step, and you must be ready for that, you must loose the fear of losing control or you will lose your project!