Open Source Projects: Unlocking the Secrets to Success For proprietary software ventures, monitoring user interactions and software utilization is a standard practice. This enables product owners to directly correlate development team activity with business value. However, for open source projects, it's often challenging to obtain the same level of feedback about project usage, gauge the project's health, and prioritize future features and bug fixes. Open source projects have become increasingly prevalent, with many companies leveraging open source components and relying on the continued existence of specific open source projects. Despite their popularity, open source projects face unique challenges in obtaining feedback about their project usage. One of the main challenges is technical in nature. Since open source projects can be forked, modified, and implemented in various ways, inbuilt telemetry becomes unreliable. Additionally, the dependency graph poses a significant issue, making it difficult to determine whether to track usage metrics of larger projects that use open source projects as dependencies. Telemetry and statistical collection are also contentious issues within the open-source community. Many contributors harbor ethical objections to tracking and statistics gathering, and intentionally omit them from their projects. Furthermore, end-users may block any form of "phoning home," making it even more challenging to gather accurate data. In summary, open-source projects often struggle to understand their user base, usage patterns, and future needs. To gain insights into this issue, I spoke with thought leaders in the open-source metrics space, including Kathy Reid, Georg J.P. Link, and Daniel Izquierdo Cortázar. These experts shared their perspectives on the challenges and opportunities in open source project metrics. To learn more about how to overcome these challenges and drive success in open source projects, check out t8tech.