Why Most Open-Source Projects Fail and How to Improve Your Odds

The open source landscape is filled with abandoned repositories, ambitious README files, and then silence. 

The promise of collaborative development and community-driven innovation collides with the reality that most open-source projects fail before they truly begin.

The conventional wisdom blames technical challenges, lack of documentation, or insufficient marketing. But after building successful open source projects like Drupal Console and guiding developers through contribution journeys, my co-founder Jesus Manuel Olivas and I have discovered the real culprit runs deeper: it's a motivation crisis.

In a recent webinar, Jesus and I shared unfiltered insights about why open source projects fail and what separates sustainable projects from abandoned ones. 

Our perspective, grounded in years of building widely-adopted developer tools, reveals that project success or failure is often determined before the first line of code is written.

The difference isn't technical sophistication or novel features. It's why you're building in the first place.

The Foundation of Failure: Starting With Wrong Motivations

The most common reason open source projects fail has nothing to do with code quality or feature completeness. It's starting with external motivations that can't sustain the long-term commitment required for meaningful projects.

When people ask me about motivations that lead to project abandonment, the first one I mention is money. If you're starting an open source project expecting to make money from it immediately, that's not going to happen. At least not from the project itself, not right away.

This misconception affects developers who launch projects expecting immediate financial returns, recognition, or career advancement. When these external rewards don't materialize quickly, motivation evaporates and projects get abandoned.

The pattern repeats across different external motivations.

• Fame and Recognition: Developers who start projects to build their personal brand often lose interest when GitHub stars don't accumulate rapidly. The overnight success stories they hear about are statistical outliers, not typical outcomes.
• Resume Building: Projects created solely to demonstrate skills for job applications lack the genuine problem-solving drive needed to sustain development through inevitable challenges and setbacks.
• Community Pressure: Starting a project because you feel you "should" contribute to open source, without having a real problem to solve, creates obligation without passion.

The main issue is that external motivations are fragile. They depend on factors outside your control: other people's responses, market conditions, timing, and luck. When those external factors don't align, the motivation disappears and the project dies.

“Solve Your Own Problem First”: The Right Starting Point for Open Source

Sustainable open-source projects share a common origin story: they begin by solving a real problem for their creator. 

This internal motivation provides the resilience needed to weather the inevitable challenges of project development.

When I describe the most sustainable approach to open source development, I always come back to the same point: the first motivation should be trying to solve a problem for yourself. 

In the day-to-day work, you see opportunities and ways to solve something, like building a small tool to automate a piece of your workflow. That's where the best projects come from.

When you're solving your own problem, you have immediate feedback about whether the solution works. You understand the use case intimately because you live it daily. You can iterate quickly because you don't need to gather requirements from external users.

The Drupal Console project exemplifies this approach. 

Jesus and I didn't set out to build a widely-adopted developer tool. We were facing a personal learning challenge: understanding Drupal 8's significant changes from Drupal 7.

The change from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 was a really big breaking change. The whole thing was changing, and personally I felt a lot of fear because we didn't know how the new things worked. Jesus had experience with Symfony, which Drupal's core was moving toward, and that became my opportunity to learn. 

Our tool emerged from genuine need, not altruistic intentions.

This personal motivation sustained us through the unglamorous early development phases. When documentation was incomplete, when bugs were frustrating, when the tool wasn't yet polished enough for public use, we continued working because we needed the solution for our own projects.

For developers considering their first open source project, the advice is counterintuitive: start selfishly. Build something you need. Solve a problem that frustrates you daily. Automate a task you're tired of doing manually. 

The broader community benefit can emerge later, but it shouldn't be the starting motivation.

How to Go From Personal Tool to Community Project

The most successful open source projects evolve organically from personal tools to community resources. This transition requires recognizing when your personal solution might benefit others and making the conscious decision to invest in that broader utility.

Jesus describes this evolution well: at the beginning, the solution makes sense for your own problem or your client's problem. You're solving something for a particular project. Then at some point, if you realize this solution could help someone else, that's when you build something more generic, something that can behave in several different ways through configuration.

This transition point is critical. Many developers stop at the personal tool stage, keeping useful solutions private. Others jump too quickly to community development without validating that their solution actually generalizes beyond their specific context.

The key indicator for making your tool public: you start encountering the same problem in different contexts. When you find yourself copy-pasting code between projects, or when colleagues ask about your workflow shortcuts, or when you realize your specific problem reflects a broader industry pain point, that's when personal tools become candidates for open source projects.

The transition requires additional work beyond the original solution. Personal tools can have hardcoded assumptions, poor error handling, and nonexistent documentation because you understand their limitations. Community tools need flexibility, robust error messages, and comprehensive documentation because you can't provide individual support to every user.

As our team has documented, this transition also requires product thinking, understanding your users, designing for their success, and building adoption through intentional strategy rather than hoping good code will speak for itself. Learn how to productize your open source here. [LINK: Productize Your Open Source Project: A Framework for Developer Tools That Get Adopted]

The Open Source Passion-to-Obligation Trap

One of the most dangerous phases in open source project development is when initial enthusiasm transforms into burdensome obligation. This transition kills more promising projects than technical challenges or competitive alternatives.

I've seen this pattern repeatedly, and I've experienced it myself. There's a phase where you're doing something out of love for the craft, and you know it's making an impact. It feels joyful. But then the project gains traction, and suddenly people start asking for things, demanding features, complaining about how long updates take. The passion becomes an obligation, and it feels like people expect you to deliver as if they were paying customers.

The pattern is predictable. Early adopters discover your tool and find it useful. Word spreads through communities and social media. Usage grows beyond your initial expectations. Then the requests begin: feature additions, bug fixes, support for edge cases, integration with other tools.

Initially, this feedback feels validating. People find value in what you've built. But the volume of requests quickly exceeds what you can reasonably handle as a solo maintainer working in your spare time. The tool that started as a solution to your problem becomes a source of stress and guilt.

The frustration is real: people start complaining about something or requiring support for features, and meanwhile we're making this for free. Nobody's paying for that. Yet the expectations keep growing.

This maker-versus-taker imbalance is endemic in open source. The vast majority of users consume open source projects without contributing back. While this asymmetry is natural and doesn't make users villainous, it creates unsustainable pressure on maintainers who feel responsible for meeting every request.

Projects die during this phase because maintainers burn out from trying to meet incompatible expectations. They want to help everyone but lack the time, energy, or expertise to address every request. The joy of building something useful disappears under the weight of community obligations.

3 Paths to Long-Term Open Source Sustainability

Successful open source projects that avoid the passion-to-obligation trap typically follow one of three sustainability models. Each approach has different trade-offs, but all provide resources to maintain project momentum beyond individual volunteer effort.

Services and Consulting Model

The most common path for developer tool projects involves building a services business around the open source project. Your expertise with the tool becomes the foundation for consulting engagements, training, and custom implementation services.

As Jesus puts it: you use your projects to build your client work, and then based on their needs you can keep improving those projects. You make money because you're working on real projects for real clients, and the open source work becomes part of that cycle.

This model creates a virtuous cycle. Client work provides revenue to sustain development. Real-world usage reveals improvement opportunities and new features. The open source project attracts clients who need expertise with the tool. Enhanced project capabilities attract more users and potential clients.

Corporate Sponsorship Approach

Large organizations that depend on open source projects sometimes sponsor their development through direct funding, employee time allocation, or infrastructure support.

Another way to make open source sustainable is when your company, as an employee, pays you for contributing to a particular project. Many agencies and companies sponsor people, either their own employees or external contributors. 

There are platforms like Buy Me a Coffee, Github Sponsors, or companies that put money on the table on a monthly basis for maintainers to keep improving projects they depend on.

This model works best for projects that provide significant value to multiple organizations. The challenge is that corporate priorities change. Sponsors may reduce funding during economic downturns, strategic pivots, or leadership changes.

Product Development Model

Some open source projects evolve into the foundation for commercial products. The open source version provides core functionality while premium versions offer additional features, support, or hosting services.

Jesus cites good examples: you can build a product, something like a hosting company for whatever framework, and then build tools around the open source project and make money. Think about HashiCorp or Pantheon. There are many companies that have built sustainable businesses this way.

This approach requires identifying monetization opportunities that don't compromise the open source project's value proposition. The product model can provide the most robust sustainability because it creates independent revenue streams.

3 Practical Strategies for Project Longevity

Based on years of maintaining successful open source projects and observing countless failures, several practical approaches can significantly improve project sustainability and prevent common failure modes.

Setting Clear Boundaries and Expectations

Many projects fail because maintainers don't establish realistic expectations about project scope, support levels, and contribution processes. Clear communication prevents misunderstandings that lead to community frustration and maintainer burnout.

Jesus emphasizes the importance of honest communication: "You need to be clear on the README file you know this is as it is there's no plans to support this I build this because I need it, say someone else it's want to take this and take to the next level you know go for it."

This transparency serves multiple purposes. Users understand what level of support they can expect. Potential contributors know whether the project welcomes external input. Maintainers protect themselves from unrealistic expectations that could lead to guilt and burnout.

Building Contributor Communities

Sustainable projects cultivate communities that extend beyond the original maintainer. This distribution of responsibility prevents single points of failure while reducing individual maintenance burden.

"You need to understand and be happy to delegate some work people is going to approach you and you have to say understand how to say no," Jesus explains when describing the temperament required for successful project leadership.

Effective delegation requires documentation that enables others to contribute meaningfully. Code architecture that supports modular contributions. Communication systems that facilitate coordination among distributed contributors. Recognition systems that acknowledge valuable contributions.

Strategic Feature Management

One of the most challenging aspects of project maintenance involves deciding which feature requests to implement, which to defer, and which to reject entirely. Without clear decision-making frameworks, maintainers often attempt to satisfy every request, leading to scope creep and technical debt.

"People is going to approach you and you want to add this hundred of new features. It's like, you know, maybe we can probably add a couple of them instead of like going to 100. And you need to understand when saying stop, you know, this is probably not the right choice for the project," Jesus advises.

Strategic feature management involves understanding your project's core value proposition and rejecting additions that compromise focus or maintainability. 

This requires saying no to reasonable requests from well-meaning users, a skill many technical contributors find difficult to develop.

Open Source Success is About Starting With the Right Foundation

Making open source is one of the most incredible things that happened in my life. I have a job because of it. Jesus and I built a company because of it. I encourage everyone to get involved in the open source ecosystem. Be patient, be willing to talk to people, and be ready to build something others can use. 

The results may not come from your first project, but the learning and connections you build along the way are invaluable.

Ready to build an open source project with staying power? At Octahedroid, we help development teams navigate the complexities of sustainable open source development, from initial project planning through community building and long-term maintenance strategies. 

Contact us for a consultation to discuss how to approach your open source initiatives with realistic expectations and strategic thinking.