| Out of the top of my mind: * Gets good enough, but not great. Then most contributor lose interest and the pace slows. It makes the original roadmap impractical and more devs lose interest, which spirals into a dormant project (Inkscape) * Maintained flawlessly, but no new groundbreaking features get added and there is a slow exodus of users toward new-shiny until it is a perfectly bug-free irrelevant piece of code (most JS stuff, GnuPG, some crypto libs, OpenBSD). * Maintained into the ground by aggressive/oppressive/elitist/cultist/dogmatic core team followed by a split of the community (pre re-merge of glibc/eglibc, GCC/EGCS, ffmpeg/libav, Gnome/MATE/Cinnamon/Unity, Vim/NeoVim, all of Suckless, most of GNU) * Fancy/overkill roadmap made at a time when there is plenty of contributors, but so hard to achieve most of them give up before the finish line (KDE4, GIMP 2.10) * Unresponsive/exclusive community toward new contributors and/or SJW attempts accidentally FUDding a previously functional community (lets not point fingers and start a flame war) * Unwillingness to break things or pay up the tech debt in order to stay relevant (EMACS, pre-LLVM-era GCC) * Break everything consistently and often and/or remove your contributions because of a dogma (Gnome) * The Free-software people and the commercial contributors revolt against each other (OpenOffice/LibreOffice/StarOffice/CollaborraOnline, OwnCloud/NextCloud) * Misguided attempts at making money by breaking things for your users (GhostScript, eLive, Mepis, Mandrake, every project who moved to AGPL) * No attempt at ensuring the project can exist without its founder (CentOS, all single-person-army projects out there, all BDFL who refuse to let go when they lose interest) * Sabotage (ion3, ffmpeg, Cyanogen) * Suicide by committee (many Apache/Eclipse foundation projects like Apache OpenOffice) * Make a major incompatible upgrade with no clear migration paths (Python, GTK, KDE, Gnome, AwesomeWM) * Promise a major upgrade, tell your users to wait for it, then backtrack (Perl) * Maintain multiple branches of your software forever until you fragment your user base so much you compete with yourself and lose to new-fancy (OpenSSL, pre-rolling Firefox, MySQL, most "enterprise grade stuff") * crazy rebranding ideas leaving most of your users unaware of the new project (Apache OpenOffice, my own SFLPhone->Inutchuk->Ring.cx->GNU Ring->GNU Jami->Banji fiasco, KOffice). |