From /. today:

An anonymous reader writes “There are 139,834 open-source projects under way on SourceForge. IWeek wonders which projects will make lasting contributions, and which will fizzle. Sure, Linux, Apache, and MySQL are winners, but what about OpenVista, FLOSSmole, and Hyperic HQ? What’s your list of open-source winners and losers?”

I know it is all kinds of fun to poke around SF.net and look at all the projects that went anywhere, or even started the trip. The thing is, a few weeks ago, I had a really interesting email exchange. Someone contacted me about the function of a class I wrote as part of a one-off two-weekend project. I walked away from a lot of that code over a year ago, and here I am getting support requests. It wasn’t even about the core functionality of the project, but a utility class I had written in it.

I was, of course, fascinated. Did you see my project? Did you care enough to look into the code? No, it was the result of a Koders search. Koders, and the less-useful Google Code Search might actually give a lot of life to those “Open Source Losers”. Even if the project never takes off, if there are useful bits of code living on the web, people will find them. It isn’t quite the grand vision of component-reuse that the Computer Scientists (capital C capital S) have wanted to see, but neither is Google the vast auto-correlated semantic web that TBL has been foretelling for a decade. Maybe, just maybe, though, it is good enough.