In a new post to his blog today Keith Casey has voiced some of his opinions on where he thinks most Open Source software efforts fail in their goals of making good, quality software that's well-developed and useful.

Earlier this week, I unsubscribed from the mailing lists of a pair of Open Source projects. About two years ago when I found the projects, they involved fascinating topics in under served niches. One of those niches - the one customer/user-facing - is still there and under served, but that's not relevant in the current discussion. In reviewing the activity on the mailing list, I noticed some interesting things: activity was very high, there were some smart people involved in the discussions and there was a lot of discussion on what should be done but nothing actually getting done.

He notes that without a codebase to work from, there can't be any direction because no one knows where things are headed or what can be done to improve it. Writing up a spec to guide the development can help, but then you still have the pitfall of who should write that spec.