How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers

There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out. That's a dilemma for the many companies that are expanding their use of open source. Corporate developers and other IT professionals must get better at divining the winners and ignoring the losers. The wrong picks can lead companies down a rat hole of support problems and obsolete software.

Good bets for the next round of open source innovation include the Mule enterprise service bus, Alfresco content management system, and Spring framework for Java applications. But what about the 139,831 other options?

One promising project on the bubble is OpenVista, software for managing health records and health care operations. OpenVista has a few things going for it: a strong code base, pressing demand, and a company bent on commercializing it. Yet OpenVista shows how leadership fissures that a proprietary software company might work through can become deep rifts in open source projects.