Almost a third of the votes in this past week's poll about the beta Project Kenai were cast for the "I don't know" option. That says quite a lot in itself. A total of 246 votes were cast. The actual question and results were:

What do you think about Project Kenai?

• 8.9% (22 votes) - It's a great new concept
• 4.4% (11 votes) - I use it and like it
• 10.1% (25 votes) - I plan to get involved eventually
• 42.6% (105 votes) - Doesn't seem that significant to me
• 32.1% (79 votes) - I don't know
• 1.6% (4 votes) - Other

The 32% who voted "I don't know" either haven't heard of Project Kenai, or perhaps they've heard the name but don't really know what it is. The 43% who voted "Doesn't seem that significant to me" are indicating that they've at least taken a glance at what Kenai offers. A total of about 23% expressed a favorable view of Kenai.

I realize now that the poll was missing an option that would let people express knowledgeable disapproval of Kenai -- that is, something like "I've investigated Kenai, and I don't like it." Had that been there, it might have gotten the vote of cowwoc, who commented:

I tried using Kenai for a while but I think I will move all my projects to Google Code. The reason is simple: polish. java.net and Kenai both suffer from the same problem: Sun starts something great and then leaves it unfinished.

To which hexer responded:

Kenai ist way better than java.net. It provides already Subversion, JIRA, mailing list, ... You just have to activate these features. It will soon give you the possibility to upload your java doc and own homepage. It is still beta so I think you can expect it to be a little bit unpolished.

cowwoc agreed that Kenai is improving every day, but:

I also believe that it will take them a very long while to reach the point I'm looking for. Maybe Kenai will be decent in a year from now, but *today* I can already create a Google Code account, swap out their issue tracker for JIRA and their mailing list for Nabble. It's hard to argue with that.

I think the poll result largely states that Project Kenai simply isn't all that well known at this point. It's a beta project, and for some (for example, cowwoc), the rough edges and incomplete or missing features that come with beta projects are unacceptable at this time. As cowwoc says: "I want Kenai to win but I've yet to be convinced."

The combined 75% of votes for "I don't know" and "Doesn't seem that significant to me" represent a pool of potential future users (should these people some day need a home for their own open source project), provided that Kenai development continues, with addition of new features the developer community wants and expects in an open source project host platform.

New poll: best phone platform for developers

Our new java.net poll asks "Which feature phone platform offers developers the greatest capability?" Voting will be open through next Thursday.