We must accept (and I'm pleased to do it) that open software is hitting more and more strong, high quality and stability are their best skills. But the most important of this move is not the generated code, it is the way of doing things. Free colaboration and to share knowledge publicly are essential. And even better it is that this philosophy oftenly is spread to daily life.

Recently I read an article about risks at open source sotfware, warning about unexpected situations that sometimes happen. At the beginning I get a little bit scary, but not too much, till I understood what it was about.

When these projects start, oftenly they are leaded by just one person. He usually is a good programmer with a good idea, and knowing what and how he wants to. This is a good start point, and enough to get a first release showing the good idea and its potential.

But it happens that if the project is accepted and a community starts to grow around it, the project must be release to the community. I mean, not only to take the community opinion into account, but also to take part in coding.

In this way, some projects are open but they only prosper thanks to the main developer, and the rest of the community only uses the product and reports bugs. They can work on it but just in a local way, they know the code but have no access to the main repository.

It's possible that if the main developer leaves the project, the community has to work hard to coordinate people to go on or start a new fork.