Not to forget the many, many places where it has and is succeeding happily.
Here's my "get off my lawn" perspective: those developers who remember a world where there was little or no free software (from, say, the mid-1980's, when Sun made the C compiler a for-cost option on SunOS through until commercial Linux distributions), have a visceral understanding of free software that those who came to it later, and (perhaps understandably) take it for granted, don't have.
Free software is a commons. In a healthy community, people pitch in to help, and maintainers become overwhelmed by the scale of activity, not because they've been left alone to support many users by themselves for years.
> In a healthy community, people pitch in to help, and maintainers become overwhelmed by the scale of activity, not because they've been left alone to support many users by themselves for years.
It's entirely because many of these projects are run by professional software developers, not professional managers. So many projects with single maintainers are that way because the maintainer feels a sense of ownership rather than a sense of stewardship.
It's not to say that solo maintainers are bad people; just that the jobs of writing software and coordinating software development require different, non-overlapping skill sets.
I don't think there's any question that this is true.
There are some efforts to address it (eg. SSL, Mongo, etc), but they're the first "drafts" if you like.
When a majority of the users of free software were programmers themselves, things were quite different to today. The world has changed, but the free software model has not kept pace.
With hindsight, I think the "Open Source" definition can be seen as a turning point, and the issues we have today stem from the decisions to give everyone the use of free software, even those who aren't of the community, or able to contribute in turn.
I don't think that was a bad or wrong decision, but I think that the ramifications are still playing out.
Here's my "get off my lawn" perspective: those developers who remember a world where there was little or no free software (from, say, the mid-1980's, when Sun made the C compiler a for-cost option on SunOS through until commercial Linux distributions), have a visceral understanding of free software that those who came to it later, and (perhaps understandably) take it for granted, don't have.
Free software is a commons. In a healthy community, people pitch in to help, and maintainers become overwhelmed by the scale of activity, not because they've been left alone to support many users by themselves for years.