The death of an open source project starts when the lead developers stop actually using the project. If it is only being maintained out of a feeling of obligation for those who have downloaded and installed the code, than it’s bound to have a short shelf life. In July of 2006 Stephen Eskin (a former student of mine) and I launched the first version of Project Alumni. We had implemented an alumni application for our High School and we figured we might as well make it available to the world. In nearly two years the project has been downloaded approximately 3400 times. I’m pretty happy with those numbers. Just query google for “Powered by Project-Alumni” and you can get a good idea of the number of sites using the project. (more…)