For anyone who believes that peer production in unstructured wikis is the wave of the future, Dr. Dobbs has some sobering news:

There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out.

The piece is a useful dose of realism on an often-gushed-over topic. It notes that:

[The attrition rate poses] a dilemma for the many companies that are expanding their use of open source. Corporate developers and other IT professionals must get better at divining the winners and ignoring the losers. The wrong picks can lead companies down a rat hole of support problems and obsolete software.

Which does lead to the question of exactly why a company would want to get into the business of guessing whether "the community" will continue to support a project (the article has a nine-point checklist for assessing the odds) as opposed to relying on the good old profit motive.

Not all "community" efforts are grassroots, either; some are astroturf, and actually exist at the whim of their funders:

Harmony and Jonas have one thing in common: They drew not on grassroots developer or user support for a core idea, but on high-level support from interested companies--IBM and Red Hat-- with their own agendas. When priorities changed for those companies, confidence in the sustainability of the project faded among supporters.