DSpace is not foundering!
DSpace now has a foundation. This is looking to be a good thing.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed chronicled the event (not OA; see Peter Suber’s summary), extraordinarily poorly. With the understanding that I do not speak for the DSpace Foundation, the DSpace committers, or the DSpace community at large…
DSpace the software project is not foundering and never has been. It is blessed with a thriving (if somewhat contentious) community of developers and adopters. It is in active development. It now has a Foundation!
Self-archiving is arguably foundering, but it’s been that way from the outset. The pathetic uptake of self-archiving is not specific to any one software platform; BePress or Fedora adopters mostly aren’t having any better luck encouraging it than I am. Certainly one might say that deficiencies in the current generation of institutional-repository software are part of the problem, but no IR package is perfect on that score, not least because they have all been predicated on assumptions about faculty willingness to self-archive now abundantly proven false.
Conflating self-archiving with DSpace as the Chronicle article does is ridiculous. DSpace has other uses than self-archiving, and self-archiving is not limited to DSpace. I would be most appreciative if the Chronicle would clarify this question—and more appreciative still if they would engage self-archiving and scholarly communication in a thoughtful and considered fashion within their pages.