Open source is looking more attractive to software development managers who need to make their budgets stretch farther, as the enterprise can benefit from FOSS community's contributions. Here's how to participate in open-source projects and measure developers' success.

There are a vast number of fantastic open source projects out there, though for every one that is widely adopted, there are many that remain cloaked in relative obscurity. How can the open source development model best be leveraged to take advantage of community feedback, ideas, and testing, and ultimately gather code contributions?

If 2008 had a buzzword, it was probably community. More and more companies are looking to tap into communities for contributions to open source projects. But following the open-source trend just because everyone is doing it isn't good enough.

No matter what you're pleasure, chances are there is an online community serving it. The open source community has many such places — Linux.com, for example — that cater to specific elements of the community. Red Hat believes there is room for a larger community for the larger community, however, and have seen to the task themselves with Monday's launch of opensource.com.

The CyanogenMod project is the quintessential open source success story. It’s got open source code, an individual hacker burning the midnight oil, and community endorsement that led the project to the big leagues. From a forum board to the executive board, the CyanogenMod project has come a long way riding on the shoulder of its community of users and developers.

Open source is no longer a novelty, even within the largest corporations. Today, 53% of businesses use open-source software, according to a recent CIO.com survey. However, not enough of those businesses are contributing code back to the open-source community, said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, at the Red Hat Summit.

Openads, formerly known as phpAdsNew, is one of the more successful open source development projects. Its online advertising software is used by many thousands of domain owners who want to make a profit on their Web content by selling advertisements.

OpenSSO is one of the best (if it isn't the best one) open source web Single Sign On projects out there. It's sad to see Oracle shutting down this amazing open source project. But here it comes the awesomeness of the open source community:

I'm a fan of many kinds of offbeat open source efforts, and the idea of community contributions can be applied to any number of pursuits, as seen previously in this post. This week I came across a few eyebrow-raising open source stories worthy of another short roundup. Here, you'll find four unusual examples of left-field open source in action.