You know, when you are working by yourself on an open source project, your schedule is your own.  If you decide you don't want to work on it for a couple of months, that's your perogative.  At some level there's no rules what-so-ever aside from not doing things that will drive folk away from being interested in your project (assuming you care).  One of the biggest things that drives the project, however, is what -you- want.  When you are working on an open source project where you are teamed up with others, there's some checks and balances over what you do and your partners do.  However, at the end of the day, it's the same type of situation, you all decide what the focus of the project will be.  I don't like to put it like this, but no one has a "right" to your time except for you.

When you start working with a company on an open source projects, things change.  There are deadlines that the company is pushing for help drive your own timeline.  There are things they'd like to see happen that you may or may not agree with.  Instead of saying "well unless you submit a patch, it's not happening", you tend to work something out instead.  It's an interesting adjustment to "normal open source projects".

Do I dislike either?  No.  In fact I've quite enjoyed the experience of it.  It's taught me a few things that I wasn't aware of.  Like I was rather blind to some of the requirements that corporations ask for.  Some of the things they ask for I would typically have thought "that's ridiculous" with some of my other projects, but here I see a lot of folk bringing the same issue up and I start to discover that the issue is more commonplace than I would have assumed.  I'm not citing any examples here.  Just suffice to say there's things that having a broader knowledge of the corporate world has made me reconsider some of the decisions I might have made with other projects in the past.

So many thanks to Jive Software for giving me this additional experience that I wouldn't have gotten probably with PyAIMt and PyICQt.  =)  It's been fun and I hope it continues to be fun!