Linus Torvalds on avoiding large projects.

In accordance with the principles stated in a previous post about developing in Internet time, open source projects tend to stay away from large and ambitious plans. This is not to say that they never reach the status of large projects, of course. However, it does mean that they usually start as small, little projects that try to "scratch an itch" and, given enough interest and a good amount of contributions, may grow to something as large as the Linux kernel, GNOME or KDE. These ideas were pretty well expressed by Linus Torvalds in an interview published by Linux Times June 2004 where they asked him if he had any advice for people starting large open source projects.

"Nobody should start to undertake a large project," Torvalds snapped. "You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or, worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly overdesigned".

(Rosenberg: p. 174)

Once more, the emphasis is on a project that's small, releases quick and nimbly responds to the users' feedback. This mindset is at the very core of the open source development model. Commercial software companies may stress that their approach is quite different, refusing to treat customers as beta testers. However, this is quite disingenous. Anybody who has gone through the experience of running the first public release of any software product knows what I mean.