InformationWeek: How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers

Charles Babcock has written an interesting article discussing how to project an open source project’s success or failure. There’s also a nice bit about the role of user communities, which includes a quote from Javier:

Many think of an open source “community” as a passel of unpaid developers who code because they love it, but that’s not the driving force behind most of the work. In general, only a small group is allowed to modify or submit changes to source code. Other developers submit code to these core developers. But most important for companies assessing the health of a project is the size–and motivation–of the group of users hammering away on the code and identifying what’s wrong with it, and how the project responds to that input. For example, the Hyperic development team spends a quarter of its time participating in user forums, CEO Javier Soltero says.

We take great pride in working with our community of users. They are our lifeblood.

There’s also a nice bit from Hyperic customer hi5 Networks. It should come as no surprise that users of other open source technologies are the most enthusiastic adopters of Hyperic HQ:

Social networking site hi5 Networks, which gets about 18 million unique visitors a month, manages its Linux-based systems using a new piece of open source software called Hyperic HQ. As a 35-employee company, hi5 has a small IT staff and hadn’t invested in a commercial system management product such as BMC Patrol or CA Unicenter. Hi5 had used another piece of open source code, Big Brother, but decided Hyperic HQ offered more, such as alerts when systems dip below performance thresholds and historical performance analysis. As a user of Apache, Linux, and the open source PostgreSQL database, CTO Akash Garg was inclined to “give open source systems management a chance.”

All in all, an interesting look at how to pick the successful projects. It’s good to be on the successful side of the field, but we know there’s still work to be done.

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