OSCommerce: A Cautionary Tale

OSCommerce, long in the tooth and somewhat widely distributed with 200,000 known stores, has bit the dust.  Evidently, the founder/coder/mad genius at the center of the project could  not manage well: the project never left beta, forums went unmanaged and fell into pr0n, and team after team of frustrated developers quit.  We’ve seen this movie before.

Every successful project, especially in the Open Source world, has a charismatic leader bean at the center.  There’s no money in there, so developers must be drawn in by the concept, but also by the visionary personality of the creator.  Some types have this in spades: Steve Jobs, Dean Kamen, Sergey Brin.  Some have the management chops to a certain level, but ultimately let some self-ascribed non-negotiable prinicple screw up an otherwise solid run: Jerry Yang, Jerry McGuire Sun Microsystems, and a whole zoo of half-assed half-built open source projects.

Someone once told me, “It’s not the strength of the idea, it’s the strength of your ability to convince other people of the strength of that idea.”  The most successful projects that eventually flourished into a viable open source application/platform all made that transition from mad-scientist-in-his-lab to wide corporate/commuinity acceptance because either one of two things happened:

1. the founder has enough charisma and business acumen to hire and manage around them (and let someone else do the day-to-day)
2. The founder happens to have a best friend early on in the process to do the business, and all the grovelling, compromising, yelling, coaching, and convincing that is needed to build up and run the circus.

So, If you’ve got that genius scheme out there, and it’s just not getting enough love on Freshmeat, it may be because you’re not sexy enough.  That, or you’re not writing enough polemic diatribes and visionary screeds on your project website.