It’s good to be a banker

…because we’re off for all the holidays, even the ones that nobody else seems to take off, like today - Veterans Day.

Today I’m working on one of the side projects I’ve got going: redesigning the website for my dad’s company - Inline Electric. It’s still sporting a design from about 1998 and looks pretty terrible.

Why haven’t I revamped it before now? Well, a little over a year ago I did build another site for Inline based on the Etomite Content Management System. Then I started a new job and the project took a back seat.

When I was thinking about picking it back up again earlier this year, the Etomite project was going through some rough times. The lead (only) deveoper left the project with another designer to start building a commercial content management system. They left the project in some - in my opinion - inexperienced hands. Though it still seems be a pretty active project, nothing too great has come out of it in the last year or so and the new developer(s)? tend to take a while to even come out with bug fixes these days.

To me, this is one of the few downfalls of adopting an open source project to solve a business solution. If the major player(s) of a project leaves, what will happen?

This doesn’t really effect the super huge projects such as Linux because there’s thousands of incredible developers ready to jump at the bit to join a project of that magnitude. But what about a smaller project like Etomite? Unlike commercial projects, the leaders have no obligations and there may not be suitable replacements in the open source community willing to take over the project.

What do you think?