[anothermouse]

I've been watching this happen like a scheduled car crash for years. Every 2 years, another open source project succumbs to the problem.

As far as I can tell, when software is open source, the barrier to people contributing is lower. And that leads to a sort of brownian jitter in the system. Once great systems, (kde in general and amarok in particular) suffer from contributions of new features, which add features but decrease reliability. Or they exist for so long that no new exciting features exist to be added, so the inevitable re-architecture death march begins (I'm looking at your kde4. You killed kde as a corporate desktop, so that you could add semantic search?).

Whatever the cause, be it the accretion of "features", or the inevitable "rinse, re-architect, repeat" cycle some project are on, it can only drive people away. But a project that is widely used collects developers, and it is difficult to say no to contributors - a common problem in volunteer projects outside software.

[digi_owl]

Yeah, for all the derision Microsoft gets for their buggy code we can still use a Win32 binary from the 3.1 days today.

You have some of the same policy at the kernel level with torvalds "we do not break userspace" policy. But the higher layers are just too damn happy with breaking themselves for it to have any meaning.