I spent a lot of time (and programmer paychecks) creating a large data presentation project (commercial), and it flopped bigtime, though we did get the system to work very well. I also decided to drop it inasmuch as people wanted me to provide merchant services at a high level, and Visa and others are really upping the ante for that level of services. {see PostUPPal}

It was an answer to a question nobody was asking, and freebies like Wiki also overlapped its user space in some ways that drained my low-hanging fruit marketplace.

I believe in natural selection, even when I was the one unselected. The more projects there are out there, the more new ideas pop up. Does OpenBSD drain from FreeBSD? NOT.

That said, it takes a lot of balls to take on managing and forwarding a big software project. Very few people have the human skills to motivate a large team, especially a volunteer team.

Of course, the REAL reason it flopped was that it was written in PHP, not Perl. :D