Why volume is (almost) everything
Finding Coders
If you're starting from scratch, you'll need a lot of users to attract a strong development community.
I have a friend who has been working on an open source project for about three years. Lately, he has become a little discouraged because few people seem to be helping with the project, so we discussed some of the issues.
First of all, most of his users are not programmers. Some users do provide input, test changes, and verify bug fixes, but few users contribute even the smallest piece of code.
His user base is also relatively small. Although the potential number of users could be in the hundreds of thousands, he has intentionally limited the number until the code reaches a more polished state.
[...]
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