Following on from the success of the Google Summer of Code program, Google is pleased to announce this new effort to get young people involved in open source development. We've teamed up with the open source projects listed here to give student contestants the opportunity to learn more about and contribute to all aspects of open source software development

Hal Steger and Alberto Onetti - both of mobile open-source leader Funambol - discuss open-source marketing in the Enterprise Open Source Journal. Well worth a read, especially for those who persist in believing that open source succeeds in the absence of good marketing. In fact, real commercial success in open source comes as a direct result of savvy marketing.

Open source in itself is a success story. From being a niche concept, it has become a mainstream movement. There are thousands of open source projects and products out there, but which ones are the most successful?

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.

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.

The open-source development model can can be powerful and incredibly beneficial for any software development project. Yet, even most open-source projects do not follow this style of development. Today, I want to talk a bit about why this is the case, and what can be done to set your project on the right path to enjoy the advantages of the open-source development process.

If the GPL seems like a bad idea from the standpoint of commercialism, consider the surge of successful open source software projects—they are indicative of a system that does indeed work. This success has evolved for two reasons. First errors in the code itself are far more likely to be caught and quickly fixed under the watchful eyes of peers.

One of the things that drive success in online games such as World of Warcraft is the community and ecosystem that surround the game itself. This is much akin to open source where projects grow and become successful as individuals become part of the whole.

Fellow OStatic blogger Joe Brockmeier took an insightful look yesterday at why open source is growing at an amazing pace.