Looking in from the outside

According to the stats, 2 in 3 projects are not considered successful, something I think all of us would gut feel agree with. Out of morbid curiosity, I’ve been following the outward signs of a long-running,yet-to-be-announced project failure in the CMS world…

• late 2006, initial discussion of the upcoming major release 3.0
• early 2007, sneek preview at a major conference
• early 2007, announcement that the current version will have an interim release to correct security issues
• mid to late 2007 – all quiet on the release 3.0 front…to quiet
• early 2008 - announcement of difficulties and long weekends of work
• mid 2008 – more previews, a demo site and a planned go-live in a ‘few short months’
• late 2008 – announcements of what the new version will not support
• early 2009 – commitment to more timely updates – and the quiet again
• a little bit later in 2009 – discussion of a beta
• now…..who knows

The above is a rough timeline of events. From the communication (mid 2006) to the most recent the indication was that there was only a ‘few more months’ of work prior to the v3 release….a few months of work that has so far taken 3 years to get complete. Sounds to famliar...

I’m just wondering that with the current number of open source communities, if there is some valuable lessons to be learned from following their progress……..