Take some time to explain how in the hell a newbie is supposed to get this project up and going so they can starting looking around to contribute. If I look up after checking out the source and the clock’s little hand has moved while trying to figure out that I was supposed to run “ant build pleasegod -Dtest=john3:16″ to have the initial project actually work then it sucks. You are bleeding away potential developers because we don’t want to jack around with this stuff. Clean up your build instructions, automate as much as you can, and put a quick rundown of what needs to be done on the project’s website. Simple.
Why your open source project isn’t getting attention – A few tips for managing your OpenSource projects, that I will follow.