Robert Kaye blogged about the OSCON talk An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid. As I read it I was thinking, yep, yep, yep, and then I realized, "wait! These don't just apply to open source. They apply to any project." For example:

• "When no one makes a decision that impedes progress." I've seen this stall many non-open source projects. Usually it hides behind "getting approval" or "getting buy-in" but it's really just that nobody makes a decison.
• "the flawed mentality that if something was hard to write it should be hard to understand" How many things have you not gotten done just because you didn't know where to start or it was too hard to figure out what you needed to do?
• "passive disinterest becomes active resistance" So we've all seen the case where someone doesn't contribute 100% because they don't really believe you're doing it the right way. I think you actually encounter this one more often in the commercial world because people tend to shut up faster when they fear losing a paycheck. I really liked Karl Fogen's advice for dealing with it:

Rather than shooting down the idea and stopping the suggestion cold in its tracks, Karl suggests that developers should instead encourage the suggester to expand on their idea. Developers could say: "Propose your idea, but you may not get much attention for your idea. The developers may simply not implement it." This does not block off the suggester and allows them to get the idea out, even if no one takes action on it.

I think there's a lot that the traditional software world can learn from open source and the community antipatterns is a good example.