On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Eliot Miranda<eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:

>> No amount of effort announcing, documenting, and promoting makes any
>> difference. I have made considerable efforts on all three over the past
>> 3 years whereas in contrast Lukas does no announcing, documenting or
>> promoting, yet people use his stuff without a second thought.
>
> Simply not true.  Google Lukas Renggli and you get
>    http://www.lukas-renggli.ch/
>
> Click on the Magritte link and you get overview, installation instructions,
> links to mailing lists, code repositories, instructions on how to report
> errors, a list of publications and a tutorial.

Indeed.  And the projects (there are many) that Lukas (or myself or
Andreas, who you also named) *doesn't* take the time to document and
promote tend not to get widely used or even known about.  A recent
favorite of mine is PetitParser: http://source.lukas-renggli.ch/petit/
.

Getting community adoption of an open source project is *hard*, and it
takes a lot of careful work and not a small amount of luck.  I've been
successful exactly twice, with Seaside and with Monticello.  But when,
eg, I announced a brand new Smalltalk system on the Seaside list last
week (http://clamato.net), the thread sank without a trace. Them's the
breaks.

Avi