Here's a cautionary tale on what you can and can't expect when doing an open source project:

The development and release of NDoc 1.3 was a huge amount of work, and by all accounts widely appreciated. Unfortunately, despite the almost ubiquitous use of NDoc, there has been no support for the project from the .Net developer community either financially or by development contributions. Since 1.3 was released, there have been the grand total of eleven donations to the project. In fact, were it not for Oleg Tkachenko’s kind donation of a MS MVP MSDN subscription, I would not even have a copy of VS2005 to work with!

To put this into perspective, if only roughly 1-in-10 of the those who downloaded NDoc had donated the minimum allowable amount of $5 then I could have worked on NDoc 2.0 full-time and it could have been released months ago! Now, I am not suggesting that this should have occurred, or that anyone owes me anything for the work I have done, rather I am trying to demonstrate that if the community values open-source projects then it should do *something* to support them. MS has for years acknowledged community contributions via the MVP program but there is absolutely no support for community projects.

This tracks with my experience doing BottomFeeder. I've gotten a lot of help from a small number of people, but that's it. I don't ask for money, but that's because BottomFeeder is funded; it's a Cincom Smalltalk demonstration project. That's why I have time to work on it - it furthers my advocacy goals.

Over time, most unfunded OSS projects die or fade away. There's only so much time that a person with a day job can devote to one. The big successes, like Linux, Eclipse and Apache have (industry funded) foundations. For all intents and purposes, they are commercial software. Which is no surprise - developers, like everyone else, have bills to pay.