How not to pick a 'Lemon' open source project

Question

There are many upon many open source projects out there (as if looking into the Abyss). What is your criteria for selecting a project to use? In other words what makes it viable? Will it be around in a year? Will it's adoption grow? etc.?

What is your criteria? i.e. mailing list traffic, number of committers, jobs posted with it mentioned, number of books published on it...

In terms of size and scope, let's say you're selecting a web development framework. So not something trivial but something you're betting the house on.

Answer 1

I'd say critical mass of the userbase. If enough people use it, then it is more likely that somebody will take over or fork the project if the current team fails to deliver.

Answer 2

My criteria:

1. Do I like it?
2. Will I use it?
3. Does it work?

If it passes those, then I use it. I don't care about how much mailing list traffic the project has, if I think it's a good project, and it's useful, I use it.

Answer 3

You can easily try small project yourself (i.e. small class libraries etc.) Large projects are wide known and any information on them can be found via Google.

Answer 4

How easy is it to contribute to the project? How easy is it to figure out how to contribute to the project? How easy is it to figure out what to contribute to the project?

Answer c) super simple for these questions will probably make it attractive to more developers and thus harder to for the project to die.

Answer 5

It depends on what I'm using it for and how easy it will be to replace if things go south. For a mission critical part of a system, it needs to be mature, have a large and successful install base, be in active development, and have a good suppot community. If its just something small that I can easily rip out, or something temporary, as long as it works and I like it thats all that counts, even if it has one developer and 5 other users.