The Courage to Fail Often

Five of the core benefits of open source software are

• little to no built in business cost structure
• lots of exposure due to being free
• it is easy to help improve a project
• many people who help build a project become advocates for and marketers of the project, reducing marketing costs to ~ $0
• if a project stops being maintained but is a good idea others can run with the idea (Wordpress was built off of the B2 core)
• the cost of failing is negligable

In spite of the above advantages, most open source projects fail. The reason for that failure is simple power law distributions. In any marketplaces only few runaway hits will exist, and if the cost to entry is ~ $0 then people will try a lot of things. But it doesn't matter if most of your ideas fail...you really only need 1 success to be set for life.

Lots of inspiration to be imaginative and fail from J.K. Rowlins here, and more in the following video