There are 19 guidelines for creating good open source software listed in his essay[2]:

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. Plan to throw one [version] away; you will, anyhow. (Copied from Frederick Brooks' The Mythical Man Month)
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
13. Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away. (Attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Your software is of much value to us the community, the more open the more involvement the community can have. This way we can return value to you.

The guidelines in my opinion just provide a mutual beneficial working relationship between commercial entities and open source communities that provide efficient working methods for high value product.

The community can be your bug checkers, market research and not require anything in return but a mutually beneficial product.

Its no criticism apart from the guidelines are always a good reference point and in my opinion essential for any modern software product.

:) Stuart

Firstly the antispammer maybe needs to be enlarged into an antispam suite.

I think this area is hugely important purely from the amount of spam I receive.

The antispam suite needs to cover a few plugins firstly the capture on sign-up. This is just opinion but I am pretty sure my spammers are bots and the current capture device must be weak.

I would like to see the possibility to include 3rd party capture services such as recapture.

Maybe even the possibility for layered capture levels.

Also when it come to authentication emails where a url is given to check that the email is correct, can this be expanded?

I was wondering if multiple url's could be included that are numerically listed. Send a small image in the picture "how many fingers am I holding up" to "Count the houses windows"...

Then you have to reply on the correctly numbered url? Get it wrong get another email? Dunno just another antibot provider.

Maybe Oxwall could provide a community submission area for image / question / answer thay they could offer to all.

User management and deleting users and banning IP's. In the deletion section it would be great to allow for those IP's to be submitted to stopforumspam and automatically go to the black list. Having some sort of link between user management and antispam of registration ip would be of much use.

Anyway its just a couple of idea's. 

Watchdog from the results I am currently getting is seriously inferior.

Maybe on this one Paul has got the jump on oxwall and as a top notch developer maybe they should encourage this level of quality and not compete in this one area?

When it comes to spam and hacking diversity is the first weapon in the armory.

Pauls done such good work with Anti-Spammer that personally I have an allegiance to the product. I keep urging him to make it commercial or offer a lite and full version. Spam is always a war to combat and it needs resources is never static and it always has a cost.

What I will say from the amount of registered users that somehow manage to get past the "capture" input, the current "capture" is of little use.

Oxwall this really needs to come out of the core so that plugins can be made. Again capture diversity will do much to hinder the spammer.

Stuart 

Works a treat and has a drastic effect on them pesky spammers.

Also I have said this but the capture is really poor, needs to be taken out of the core so it can be a plugin. Diversity is the way to beat them.