InformationWeek has a nice article titled: How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers

It's a long 6 printed pages article, not read it completely, but at page 2 there is nice chart with 9 points that an OpenSource project should have in order to be a winner.

Ayende also wrote a nice blog entry about it.

I'm trying to evaluate Subtext using that metrics (and giving points from 0 to 5):

• A thriving community: we have just 4-5 core dev and a few contrib. But all the main contributors are very committed and a lot of discussion going on (4)
• Disruptive goals: our only competitor in the .NET world is CS, and we are on a pretty different market, but we should "fight" against WordPress, Blogger: is world domination a good goal?  (4)
• A benevolent dictator: we have Phil (5)
• Transparency: well, mailing list is quite democratic (5)
• Civility: not happening at the moment (4)
• Documentation: our documentation is a bit shattered among developer blogs, official site, wiki, and user blog, but we have al lot of docs, maybe we need to organize it better (3)
• Employed developers: if working from 8pm to 4am is considered full time, then we have them  (2)
• A clear license: BSD isn’t clear enough? (5)
• Commercial support: at the moment we don’t need them, since no commercial projects around, but quite responsive to requests (2)

So 34 out of 45… not bad, isn't it?

If you are a Subtext user, what do you think about this?