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?"

Comments

Winners

[Dynedain]

Aside from the obvious big winners (ie. Firefox/Apache/MySQL/PHP/FreeBSD/Linux) here are some of the lesser-known winners that I like:

Cyberduck - Very clean OSX FTP client
Joomla! - Content Management System
SmoothWall - Router/Firewall Linux distro
VNC - remote desktop
PDFCreator - Great PDF printer for Windows, but really hard to find
VLC - all in one media player for OSX
XMMS - WinAMP-like media player for X11 systems
MythTV - even though it doesn't work for me (yet!)

Some that I think are losers:

Mambo - The project Joomla! forked from when the devs split with the corporation owning the copyright.

OpenDarwin - since Apple seems to be intent on not giving back whatever it doesn't have to.

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)

Sunbird - the calendar component of Mozilla's offerings... Firefox development has been blasting along, even Thunderbird is doing great, but Sunbird (both the standalone and plugin version) seem to have stagnated... very very unfortunate since the iCal standard is going to explode with the iCal server in OSX Server 10.5 and there are very few Windows clients that utilize it. Mozilla could capture a huge market share here.

PalmOS - once a closed-source winner... soon to be an open-source loser as the Linux-based OS supposedly in development is not adopted. Palm could dominate the market again if they pulled their heads out of their asses (not very likely).

Some of my winners may ultimately be losers. For example, SmoothWall hasn't had a major update in several years, PDFCreator is difficult to find, and would disappear if Adobe included a PDF printer with Acrobat Reader or Microsoft included one in Windows. Likewise, some of my losers could easily become winners if they could pull their acts together.

You can see my bias (as a web developer) but "loser" open source projects seem to just fade away. So I don't think there are many memorable examples as there are of winners. And of course every winner can easily be eclipsed and made a loser if they don't stay on the ball just like closed-source projects.