How To Tell Open-Source Winners From Losers

An anonymous reader writes "There are 139,834 open-source projects under way on SourceForge. IWeek wonders which projects will make lasting contributions, and which will fizzle. Sure, Linux, Apache, and MySQL are winners, but what about OpenVista, FLOSSmole, and Hyperic HQ? What's your list of open-source winners and losers?"

I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a program

[Anonymous Coward]

This is backwards, I hear about a program, then I go look for it on Sourceforge. Who has time to sift through 100,000 hobby projects? Let others discover and bring the good ones to light. That is what true open source is all about.

the winners are ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who don't want to reinvent the wheel.

Photo display, like Gallery
Forums , like phpBB

Hint

[Pxtl]

If it's an MMORPG that 12 people on the project who've been working on it for about a year, and they've got a small stack of concept art and some story documentation to show for it, it's probably a loser.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

I'm not sure if you are joking or not, so...

Here is a partial list of successful free software projects not on Sourceforge:

• Linux
• Apache
• Python
• Ruby (off and on Rails)
• PostgreSQL
• Most of GNU
• *BSD

A better place to look for successful free software projects is http://packages.debian.org/ [debian.org].

Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[Richard Steiner]

I don't care so much if a program is popular. I'm more interested in whether or not a program is actually USEFUL to me. :-) Some of the open source stuff I love is quite unpopular, but I don't care because it does what I want in the way I want it done.

That's one of the beauties of open source -- "winning" doesn't always matter.

How to tell?

[bendodge]

1. Does it have a good plan and some goals
2. Is it something someone needs? (Edison and the electric voting machine...)
3. Can it be to kept current and out of obsoletion with reasonable effort?

Other than that, only time will tell.

Easy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Winners:

root@localhost>./configure %% make && make install
root@localhost>
(program/library/whatever works)

Losers:

root@localhost>./configure %% make && make install
error: unable to find . You need to install library.
root@localhost>rm -rf ./*
root@localhost>

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a partial list of successful free software projects not on Sourceforge:

No, that's basically it. When it comes to server software, interpreted languages, a couple of RDMSs, browsers, and toolkits, Sourceforge is GREAT!

I was looking for some accounting/bookkeeping software and CRM software on Sourceforge for running my non-IT business and I found it to be incredibly lacking. Most of the projects were in the Alpha stages, if that, and many were just starting up. I need software now. I don't have time to contribute my very rusty programming skills either. So, I had to get a commercial package...that's me.

A friend of mine who runs a blog and a comment site much like this one (political) was using some F/OSS blogging comment posting software. He isn't technical and needed support which was lacking in the F/OSS version of the software he was using. He can't afford to hire a F/OSS developer. So he purchased a commercial application for around $300.00 that meets all of his needs.

Now, as someone who reads Slashdot everyday, I can assure all of you that I mentioned EVERYTHING that you folks are about to mention to me. He wasn't interested. He NEEDED a piece of software that worked and worked now - no Beta, no Alpha - A RELEASED VERSION of software and someone who will fix his problems.

I just committed heresy here on Slashdot and I'm waiting for the wips and chains.

Same rules as real life..

[digitalderbs]

The same rules apply to open source as they do in real life.. it's not about quality necessarily. To quote Sean Connery in The Rock,

Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.

The prom queen, in this case, is your PC.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[drinkypoo]

I prefer freshmeat.net. They do have non-OSS stuff but you can search by license type. It keeps you updated, it has download and homepage links for most projects, and people can rate things, the latter of which is the interesting part.

benevolent dictators

[BertieBaggio]

FTFA:

MySQL, Linux, and other successful open source projects all have this in common: a Linus Torvalds sort of figure, a benevolent dictator with the humility to see the value in other people's work. [...] At Samba, founded in 1992 to provide file and print capabilities across Windows, Unix, and Linux, it's the diplomatic yet decisive Jeremy Allison.

I'd add that a good characteristic is that these 'benevolent dictators' have a good habit of speaking out on matters of importance. For LT, it is about GPL v3 - and although I may disagree with his conclusions [slashdot.org], the debate is valuable. With JRA it was taking a principled stand against a deal that he saw as damaging the community, resiging [slashdot.org] in protest [slashdot.org] from Novell (and was/is now being snapped up by Google?).

A project is more likely to succeed if they have an open-minded, forward thinking leader who doesn't shirk the big issues. Of course, picking battles is important - you probably won't hear ESR talking about maintaining biodiversity in freshwater lakes, or RMS warn people about the rapid spread of Lyme Disease any time soon. Still, being able to spot potential external troubles can be just as important as spotting potential internal ones.

Seconded. Numbers != success

[benhocking]

We have an open source project that models brain regions [neurojet.net], that is extremely unlikely to ever be widely used by a general audience. However, if it were used by 25% of neuroscientists who run brain simulations, I'm sure we'd consider it successful.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[jellomizer]

You are thinking in terms of getting a program and using it yourself, for your own setup. If you are working in a larger business environment this may not hold useful.

Leaving out any of the stupid Political how Bosses are stupid and stuff here are some facts why you should be more interested in more Successful projects.

Training Costs: Training costs are more then paying an expert to tell the people how to use the product during a meeting. It is the downtime people suffer from the learning curve on the product. Say it is an easy to use App and it takes a company of 100 employees only 15 Minutes to learn and get useful. Assuming an average wage of $15.00 an hour That is about $300 (The actual multiplication is more but we can assume that they can make up some of the loss time that day) So for a Very Simple application that is very easy to use we have spent enough money to Pay a $15.00 hour employee for 1/2 a week. As a program grows in complexity the numbers a higher, and if the CEO needs to use this app it can get expensive quickly. If you use a more popular application there are chances that there will be more people who already know the product and less training expenses.

Dynamic Needs: Companies needs are rarely static, and they are often the same changes that happen with other companies. Using a more Active and Popular tool increases the chances that the product will keep up with the needs.

Security: One lonely programmer checking for security or a large team checking and fixing security. Which do you prefer.

Finding the Product: If you are trying to find a product that meets your needs you will normally find the more popular product first then then other guys later. So it comes up with how much time/money are you willing to spend to find that needle in the haystack that will work perfectly with you. Or the more popular app is good enough and will get the job done.

Support: If there is a problem what is the base you can turn to. If the project is too unpopular then the only guy you can contact is the developer, and if he is tired explaining the products he just may not talk to you. For more popular products there is a community you can turn to get support on your problems.

Now for some of the PHB problems.

Unknown Name: MySQL, Linux, Apache They get some coverage in the non-tech rags. If it is to remote then the Boss will not want to try it because they haven't heard from anyone else professionally on how well it works or not. As well articles stating its success if the project fails.

What if the project stops: What if the project just stops. Who will keep the product alive. Trusting a Company Critical Application so a program that may day doesn't sound good to me.

If this doesn't work who to blame: if the S**T hits the fan fingers will be pointed and if the project isn't popular enough it will go under the radar and toward the person who implemented it or approved the implementation. Saying it is Linux or Microsoft fault will ease the blame towards the individuals because the product has been used sucessfuly elsewhere. But if was GNUseless then You will get the blame.

Sure for personal use you can use whatever application you like. I myself for text editing I prefer JED not as much Vi or Emacs. As well as some other less used tools. But if I need to implement on a company bases even for a very small company going with larger names actually does make it easier to get it approved and implemented.

Quick tip...

[jimhill]

If a guy is worried about his project being perceived as a "looser", it's a loser.

Define "Winner"

[Hymer]

...in our reality we can't measure success in kG of gold left by users... installed base may be a way of measuring but how do you get that info (and no, that is not the same as "how many downloads") ?
A winner is simply a project with a satisfied userbase of significant size.
...and no, that doesn't make Windows a success... just ask any Windows user if they would accept a car, TV set or washing machine wich behaved like their Windows and you'll get the answer "You are not serious, are you ?".
--
I left Windows 3 years ago with the intention of returning after one year...

Winners vs. Losers? ... its not a game

[CountJoe]

I don't appreciate the idea of Winners vs. Losers in the open source world. It's not a game. There are a lot of open source projects that never get released or never get a following, but that doesn't make them Losers. Sometimes you start a project and find out that someone else has already done, or is doing, something better. Sometimes you just lose interest. Things happen. At least some people are trying. And they're not losers.

I say this because I have started/joined several now-dead projects.

Barely anyone is a loser

[rg3]

I have developped several open source programs. Most of them very small tools, none of them over 3000 lines as much. From those, only one has a number of users in the thousands and can be considered a "winner". However, I use two more of them _daily_. One of those two doesn't even have 50 users if any. There's another one which I don't know how many people use but probably almost none, but I did it for my father, and he uses it from time to time with great results. And, finally, I did another one for an online friend that, as far as I know, has used it successfully many many times.

So, are they losers really? If I use them, I don't care how many more people use them. They fill my needs. If I create a program for another person or group of people and they use it frequently because it fullfills their needs, how can it be a loser?

The only losers are the programs that aren't used by anyone, the people that asked for it or their creators. And how much of those are there? I don't think many.

Re:Easy!

[lahvak]

Losers: whoever runs "configure" as root.

all

[treak007]

Even if only one person downloads the software and finds it useful, then the software is still a success. Perhaps not a success from a business model sense, but a success in an open source sense.

Size of user base means little

[ChrisA90278]

Many of those 100,000+ projects were never ment to be "big" for example I have one project there. It is a Linux kernel drivel and some user land stuff that goes with it. The driver controls an astronomical camera of which less than one dozen wer made. Onless you run a TASS Mk III camera you don't need this.

Much of this stuff is intended for a very small user group, so if only 50 people use it, it is not a failure. One example is software to help with EME radio (EME is "Earth, Moon, Earth" where you bounce radio signals off the moon.) this is very popular but only within a small community. Actually MOST software is like this. Here at work I'm working on software to process telemetry data from space lift boosters. Not many people need this. I'd guess n the closed source worlld 99% of everything is written for just a few users and therefor never published.

Don't count quality or usefullness by the number o users

Nice list. With one bummer.

[Qbertino]

Blender - just not enough market for another 3D app, which is why the commercial company sold it off to begin with. The nonstandard interface and workflow gets in the way and only enthusiasts really use it (like gimp, but with a much much smaller install base)

My gosh. Your list is more or less compliant to mine, but this is a complete bummer. Blender is one of the gallionfigures of the OSS movement and it's installed base is easyly 10 to 100 times larger that that of Gimp. If only Gimp were as easy to install as Blender. It competes with packages that are 50 times larges and cost upwards of 2000$. It's got a fully OpenGL accelerated GUI - which afaik no other programm has had that long - and has gotten recent feature additions that put it way ahead of competition in a lot of fields. Blender is the OSS application that is currently scaring the living piss out of the entire 3D industry and for good reasons too. You're entirely wrong on this one.

I'm still waiting for a competitor...

[patio11]

Three times my little slice of commercial software development has made it onto Slashdot. (http://www.bingocardcreator.com -- It makes bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers.)
Three times folks have said its trivial (true as it goes -- it took me a man-week to write.)
Three times folks have said its disgusting to charge $24.95 for it (good thing I don't sell to Slashdot readers.)
Three times folks have said OSS is going to put me out of business.
Three times folks have actually offered to donate labor to put me out of business. ...

Three years my OSS competitor has gone without a patch. (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards) It lacks a few key features, like actually printing the cards it makes. This makes it more active than 80% of the projects on Sourceforge.

Is bingo-cards a success? Well, it probably accomplished what the author wanted it to, and good for him. Is it going to put me out of business? No. Is OSS ever going to supplant commercial software in bingo card creation or a whole lot of other human endeavors? No.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[Eskarel]

True, closed source applications can die(or more likely move onto a new non compatible version), but close source applications die in different ways than open source ones.

Closed source applications die because they are unprofitable, or because the company that makes them tanked for some other reason. This is a problem, particularly with smaller applications, but a good product worth paying for is usually profitable, and most large companies don't tank, and if they do their profitable assets are bought by someone else. Companies rarely decide to stop making a profitable product simply because they don't want to make it anymore, and if a product goes from profitable to unprofitable it's probably becauses there's something else most of the market has switched to and you probably want to as well.

Open source developers on the other hand, can stop working on a project for a whole host of reasons. The lead developers could become bored with the project(this happens a lot with software for which all the "cool" parts are already done. They could have a change in lifestyle which decreases the time they have available to the project(ie getting married, having a kid, etc). They could be in an accident.

Companies are relatively stable, and they're motivated by money, so long as the money flows the product flows, whether it's boring or not. Open Source, particularly much smaller products, is much more fickle. The fact that you have the source available afterwards is really rather immaterial, since if the company had sufficient development staff to maintain the software they would have written it, or forked it themselves.

Re:Easy!

[edunbar93]

Next you're going to tell me that I should never run any compiled program as root (and most servers need to start as root even if they run as another user) unless you've checked over every line of that software for backdoors and security vulnerabilities yourself. Because you know, it's just as easy for the developer of said software (or a third party attacker!) to insert a backdoor or exploit into fastlib.c as it is to insert one into Makefile. And while we're at it, you should never run ls, mv, cp, df, du, dd, who, ps, cc, rm, chmod, mkdir, chown, or passwd as root, because the system might have been compromised and they might be trojans. Or better yet, since systems administrators cause 95% of all systems failures, just change the root password to THs7h^%$1LKqD&!, and burn the post-it it was written on before reading it. And then shoot the systems administrator and his entire family, just in case he remembered it and accidentally blurted it out in his sleep.

Or, you can accept a little risk somewhere along the way and actually get some fucking work done.