Some Situations Cause Drastic Turn in Development (Score 1)

My own project, Double Choco Latte, has been through several twists in the development cycle. These are normally due to the direct influence of the company I work for requiring a new feature to be implemented in DCL. This also has an adverse impact on how readily the project can accept patches from the community.

As an example, I was developing the FAQ functionality of DCL (and is still unfinished) when the company suddenly had need for a trouble ticket system apart from the bug tracking. Rather than see them throw good money down the drain, I completely halted development of the FAQ system and shoehorned the TTS into DCL. Since then, some users have implemented the missing features on the FAQ.

Being that I am currently the sole developer, getting feature requests and bug reports can be a bit overwhelming and may take additional response time. I have also received a couple of patches that I didn't implement because they didn't fit in with the overall design of DCL. Admittedly, it's not currently perfect, but I make every attempt to at least remember the features that everyone has requested and *not* simply say "I won't implement that". Those unapplied patches will be reimplemented in DCL as they are common feature requests.

In the past, I had tried to proactively seek development/documentation assistance for the project. While I got several responses with interest, in the end it is still only me doing the development work. Parts of the project also suffer because of this since I have to ultimately prioritize the whole bug/feature list into a serialized, volatile road map. I would much prefer to do some development with a few more individuals so more ground is covered a lot more quickly.

So, that's my experience thus far with my own Open Source project. Collaboration is a two-way street that not only requires the cooperation of the project developers, but that of the community as well.