On the TV show American Idol, contestants are weeded out weekly, victims to the popular vote and, of course, a stunning lack of talent.
In the open source world, less popular projects might not be asked to leave the sites they’re hosted on, such as SourceForge.net, but the best and the brightest are destined for greatness, often ending up as the code behind major software projects. Defining a good project, though, is somewhat of an art in itself.
“The criteria I’ve always used are that the problem the solution is trying to solve is solved adequately and people are happy with the solution,” says Ross Turk, Sourceforge.net community manager.
Other good indicators include the breadth of the project’s distribution and its inclusion in different repositories and platforms, he adds.
SourceForge.net provides a weekly list of the top 100 most active projects based on consumption — the number of hits, the number of downloads, the freshness of the releases, the frequency of logins of project administrators and the amount of collaboration.
But the best open source software projects are those whose developers have understood it’s not just about writing great code, says Turk.
“One of the differences between open source and closed source is because of the availability of software. The key to success is in understanding the barriers that keep people from installing it once they’ve downloaded it,” he says. “The projects I’ve seen that are very successful are the ones that put a lot of effort into the downloading and installation processes and into allowing users to take it one step further and start to participate.”
OpenLogic Inc., a Broomfield, Colo.-based firm that helps enterprises find, deploy and manage open source products, has a library of open source projects customers can browse. That makes it easier for enterprises to be assured of the quality of the project: each has undergone a 42-step selection and certification process.
“We help enterprises consume and manage open source, so we give them one place to go for a trusted set of projects that we keep updated and maintained,” says founder and CTO Rod Cope.
“Over the last several years we’ve collected the cream of the crop of open source. There is a bunch of project repositories that host about 160,000 different projects today, and we’re really scraping off just the top 300 or so enterprises are using or have asked us to add to the library, the ones that are really ready for prime time.”
So which ones are ready for prime time?
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