The quest for a winner open source project

Today I came across this interesting article at Information Week about the keys for a successful open source project: "How tell the open source winners from the loosers". Among other things, they offers a series of criteria to spot a successful open source project:

• A thriving community
• Disruptive goals
• A benevolent dictator
• Transparency
• Civility
• Documentation
• Employed developers
• A clear license
• Commercial support
  

This article put me to consider, again, if my the project I've been developing with my colleges at the UPC, the Grid Market Middleware, has any future at all as an open source project.

Applying Information Week's test, it seams that we meet what is in my opinion the single more important criteria: Disruptive goals. Our long term goal is to offer a platform for the research of economic based grids, opening the possibility to trade computational resources among communities of users, either for profit or as a form of community collaboration. We believe this will lead to a web 2.0 like grid environment. And I think that we are in a perfect timing, as Amazon is now making grid something popular, so we could expect a grow in the demand for grid solutions.

We also have a benevolent dictator: or at least I think that, ahem, I qualify for the job.

The lack of a thriving community or commercial support is not yet a problem, as we are still building the foundations of the gmm.

What seams critical now is to improve the documentation as most of the design is still in my mind. Also we need urgently at least a full time developer to implement the core on which others could start contributing.

I hope we could tackle this resource bottleneck before we pass to enlarge the statistics of "dead on arrival" open source projects.