> <i>The project also faces the hurdle of trying to popularize an open source project — these projects often sound great on paper, but doesn’t work too well in practice.</i><p>If I read correctly, they are suggesting that if Diaspora were proprietary, it would have been easier to market. That sounds so impossible that I'm wondering if they really wanted to say that.<p>I'm also wondering about their second statement : are they saying that open source projects actually "don't work too well in practice", or is this a statement about the general <i>perception</i> of open source projects?