Ever wonder whether a given FLOSS project is going to succeed or flounder? Need a little help reading the tea leaves? Now you can follow along at home with a handy scorecard that looks at everything from source control to project communication.

Now that Sam Ramji, Microsoft Corp.'s point man on open source software, is leaving the company at the end of the month, who will possibly fill his shoes and continue to lead Microsoft further into the world of open source collaboration.

One of the things that struck me as I roamed the floor of the Dreamforce event (besides the fact that I find events like this to be incredibly depressing) is that there is a clear difference between companies that form a "community" and those that are part of an "ecosystem."

Is Open Source capitalist or communist? Yes. About once a week a certain blogger stridently claims Open Source is a Capitalist Movement! or Today, Open Source is Commercial! and Open Source is About Capitalism, Not Freebies! In fact, the truth is more complicated.

On February 9, 1998, I published the Open Source Definition and the public announcement of the Open Source Initiative that Eric Raymond and I were starting. This was the first time that the general public heard what Open Source was about. Friday, February 8 is the last day of Decade Zero of Open Source. Saturday, February 9 is the anniversary of Open Source and the start of Decade One. It's a computer scientist thing. We always start counting from zero :-)

My wife and I started a web development company back in June of this past year 2007. In doing so we sought out using open source applications to help us run our business from the beginning to help us save money. I will share with you what open source applications we have been able to use instead saving us an estimated about of $100,000 and counting.

I stated yesterday that open source had not been widely adopted in the UK without really backing the statement up. Fortunately SiriusIT, the UK-based open source services firm, has revamped its site with a blog entry explaining the situation with the example of open source adoption in the schools sector.

Sun Microsystems has unveiled a new tool that lets developers build an OpenSolaris storage server in 10 minutes, part of its three-year-old open source storage community effort. The vendor contends that open source technology provides cheaper, more cost-effective storage infrastructures, just as open source efforts in the past led to cheaper server environments.

Over the last few months, open source has gained momentum at Stanford University in the form of the Stanford Open Source Lab. Inspired by groups like the Free Software Foundation, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, Drupal, Openflows Community Technology Lab, and MIT’s Open Course Ware, a few people at Stanford decided to band together and dedicate their time and energies to the development of free/open/libre learning and knowledge resources.