Recently someone recommended me the CMS Concrete5. I had never heard of this CMS, but whatever little I saw, I found it very exciting. Seemed so much better than Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal - all of which I have got my hands dirty with. So the question hit me. Why did I not come acress this CMS before? This means that there could be many more interesting projects out there which I do not know about.
This got me thinking about what is my source of information? My immediate friends are not into exploring new stuff so they are out. Paid publishing sources like news sites are all sold to the companies with their journalists getting ego massages by paid PR teams. So they are out too. Many blogs / discussion boards are a lot freer but cater to niche audiences with niche tastes. For example, NewsYC caters to startups. "Experts" to have their own biases are and usually oriented towards the elite companies / VC funds.
So how does a regular guy get to know about a good Open Source project? I think the viral word-of-mouth loop just got a lot more important. Large companies with an army of content writers are blasting the airwaves / cyberspace, so to speak and there is no place to broadcast your project. If you can spread happiness to one person, that person will pass it on to many others. That is the challenge of future Open Source projects.
Projects will have to sustain much longer and will have to cover a lot more functionality than before to get noticed. Someone starting / promoting a new Open Source project must be aware of this. Its going to be so much harder!
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