A good example of this is Swarm, we've had a strong desire to contribute back open source code but have been inhibited by the fact that there is a strong internal competitive nature to the ecosystem. Compare the slogans of the different folks now working around the ecosystem: cryptoequity (Swarm), smart securities (Symbiont), cryptoequity (Overstock), smart corporations (Koinify).

Also, if you look at the stats you'll see that although Counterparty has greater than 80% of the transaction volume among Bitcoin blockchain projects, the market capitalization of Maidsafe (on Omni/Mastercoin) is greater than all Counterparty projects combined.

So in general people are making only a loose commitment to the underlying technology and ecosystem

I do have a large desire to open source code and provide other resources back to the community, but don't feel like I can do that in the current environment with the risk of taking a major economic loss on my part as a result.

In any case, all of these are factors in my decision to run or not run for the Counterparty board. If they can't be resolved, I honestly don't think Counterparty has a future.

I'm Joel Dietz, Swarm founder.
[...]
Obviously I've already committed a lot of time and energy to this ecosystem, but it's not entirely clear to me that it is growing at the pace necessary to be competitive.

In case you missed it, here's the latest news from the Counterparty team:

Announcing Symbiont – Building the Next-Generation Platform for Financial Markets http://counterparty.io/news/announcing-symbiont/

Serpent has lost funding. Some projects have been written in Serpent, but according to Vitalik:

    I personally will not have time to continue Serpent development at anything more than the current glacial pace [...]

Unless someone from the Counterparty community wanted to maintain Serpent, it's dead.

It should be possible to fork cpp-ethereum and make Solidity compatible with Counterparty, but the severe limitations in Solidity make me question Ethereum's programmable contract concept.

On the one hand the core concept itself is quite vulnerable to language ecosystem takeovers, because these are miniscule, poorly maintained designer languages based on experimental compilers and VMs. OTOH is the concept of Turing complete code really that much better than a semi-restricted DSL, or even hard coding features into the protocol? If your idea of Turing complete is Python, well Serpent is downright bad. It lacks basic programming features and is in general the opposite of confidence inspiring. Solidity is not much better. They still don't have arrays. I'm not sure it's even worth copying, because it would be trivial for a better approach to crush whatever sliver of a network effect Ethereum has with something better written or written with a better architecture.

[...]

Crafting beautiful UX is infinitely more valuable than offering a Turing Complete™ platform.

Isn't it more viable for anyone with an interesting "contract" idea to just visit https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterpartyd and create a damn pull request? What is so hard or bad about that? It works plenty well for Bitcoin. Who are the industry leaders who don't think that's good enough?