Very informative. Curious of what others think of the measurements of the three pillars of open source:
- Project-Community Fit: GitHub stars
- Product-Market Fit: Downloads
- Value Market Fit: Revenue
- Project-Community Fit: GitHub stars
- Product-Market Fit: Downloads
- Value Market Fit: Revenue
Basically any Github metric in isolation doesn't mean much. Anecdotally, I once worked on a ML framework in Rust[0]. For at least a few months after release the metrics looked good on paper (Top 5 Rust project by stars at the time) and also had a few smaller contributors. Sadly next to no actual adoption and no healthy community around it that was able to pick it up after we had to stop maintenance.
Downloads are about as bad. Just have one or a few users that have CI or deployment patterns that download the package a lot, and your numbers lost any meaning.
I am thinking aloud here: maybe the product-market fit, project-community fit and the value-market fit were not so clearly separated or sequential but more interrelated from the very beginning. You have to find the value-market fit and define the business problem first and then the community will thrive? The value to the community is not only what the project can bring to the business, but also the value this project can bring to its contributors and adopters.
I would say the main reason probably was that it wasn't really usable. We first optimized for performance, so that we were able to show that we are competitive there and neglected usability. Anything more than a simple MNSIT example was incredibly verbose.
Adoption would've probably come with some time (and there was quite some interest in the niche), but the project was a last ditch effort of our dying startup, so we didn't have enough time really.
I think this is pretty interesting metric and should show the difference between true community efforts (maybe Linux, GCC?) and those where opening the source is just a way of selling more.
Downloads are a quite difficult metric too without more context. E.g. depending on your project, you might just get tons of downloads because you're an easily replaceable sub(-sub)-dependency of something popular, because of some your users have download-happy CI, ...