If I had to name the open source projects with the largest development teams, Gnome and KDE would probably come to mind. After that I read on the LXDE devlopment blog that they rank quite high in the list of active projects on Ohloh.

Again this year MAKE Magazine blog has publishes the annual Open Source Hardware Guide listing no less than 60 open source hardware projects, ranging from simple microcontroller boards to a fully functional cell phone.

As the last post of the year I wanted to sum up a short list of the best open source projects I met in 2008. Several from the list were created way before, but only got used by yours truly this year.

Black Duck Software released a list of the top 10 projects launched in 2008 that have the most promising future in the open source community. The company also says if you're trying to decide which FOSS horse to back in the next year or so, you should put your money on mobile apps.

Charlie lists ten projects that have been on ice for years and that are more than worthy of being revived. The C&C-like "Boson" and original destroyable-terrain "Slickworm" are on that list.

"Organizing your tasks into projects can help you plan ahead, track your progress, and stay motivated. Working from a project list allows you to plan your day or week instead of just reacting to other people's requests. Keeping your projects and tasks in Org makes it easier for you to review your completed tasks and plan the next step. If you include some text describing why you want to do the project and what your intended outcome is, this can help you stay motivated throughout a long project.

Back at the 2003 OSCON, r0ml Lefkowitz gave a talk called "Six Missing Open Source Projects".The next year he gave a talk titled "More Missing Open Source Projects". At the top of his first list was CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, systems...

An analysis of 1,311 open source projects revealed that open source developers reused code from those projects in other projects more than 365,000 times, saving the open source community over 316,000 staff years and tens of billions of dollars in development costs.

Think open source and you might think many things, but I doubt very much that banking will be towards the top of the list or even on the radar for that matter.