Fear not for your competence. I'm sure I'm a less-competent Perl programmer than you (so far).

That aside, I find no fault with anything you've said in this node, and I agree.

One of the things I find most pleasing about the dynamics of open source development is the way it harnesses the energies of disparate, intensely individualistic people in a way that allows them to wander in and out of projects, contributing to a cohesive whole (unless and until they start or get stuck in a project that means enough personally to prompt them to invest more than dilettantism) without having to subsume the individual in any way. Every individual's talents and efforts are individually important in the creation of the whole product, in and of themselves. One doesn't tend to run into the situation typically found in proprietary closed source development circles where someone passes out orders and everybody falls into line for fear of losing the paycheck. That's how marketing flacks gain traction while engineers lose it.

I think perhaps the best thing one can do to help an open source developer maintain the motivation to stick with a project is to remind him or her of what he or she gets out of it. People tend to go into these things for selfish reasons, and I think that's a good thing: when you start writing software because you want the software you're writing, you have a personal stake in producing the best software possible for your purposes. That's why open source development works, for the most part. When a particular developer reaches the point where that motivation for developing a particular piece of software has been worn down while the aggravations have built up, it's best to help the developer remember why he or she started working on the project in the first place. If that's not enough any longer, or if that prompts him or her to fork the project, so be it. At least then the developer will be making the decision for the right reasons.