Open source Projects, The Life Cycle

Recently, I have been involved into the development of an open source project, that is currently under major modifications. Seeing this change happening before my eyes got me to think, how do open source projects evolve, and how do exiting well matured (old) projects reached their current state.

I feel that most open source projects start with a crazy idea, usually driven by some sort of need (the itch as called by The Cathedral and the Bazaar). But when one thinks about it, not many people have the guts to go out in the open to satisfy that drive. Mostly people who do aim to get an up and running prototype that shows the idea to the community. This is mainly to get people in the community excited, and people who had a similar itch involved.

To reach that initial prototype, the team working is often small, as the community knows nothing yet. The lack of the outsider perspective might limit the developers to their own coding style, and the drive of getting a prototype out might loose focus on certain coding aspects.

After the prototype is out, the effects of the bazaar model is seen, where bugs are fixed, code is optimized, improved, and documented. At this stage, the project takes it's first step to maturity.

The changes over time could range the minor to the drastic. The main issue that developers wanting to get involved  with an evolving project, whether rapidly or slowly, patience is need. This is due to the need to take time to obtain a deep understanding of the code. Furthermore, patience is needed when a project is changing rapidly, as they mostly could end up in code breaks, but keep in mind they will eventually be fixed (possibly by you). Such an aspect also requires high flexibility.

After these many iterations by the community, the project starts to stabilize into a state of maturity. Usually this is called the 1.0 release. After that stage, progress starts to slow down, and focus starts to go to having new features. The main code base is rarely changed unless with major following released, or core feature additions that require that due to the structure of the code.