Mozilla Labs is what it name stands for. A place where people come together virtually to produce creative works mostly web based technologies. Mozilla Labs hosts a number of popular projects and involves active community participation.

Think of Sun Microsystems, and what comes to your mind? For me? Purple workstations--my first exposure to Sun equipment. For others, it might be Solaris. Or Java. There's a host of things Sun was well-known for before it was acquired by Oracle last year and systematically dismantled to fit within the Oracle ecosystem. But I'll bet middleware was not one of the things you initially recalled.

Here are my picks today, though, for hot new OSS projects...

One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project.

At one point in the lesson I brought up open source, and he nearly turned red saying, “Nothing is free.” That statement got me to thinking about free, open source, and open source projects. He is right - nothing is free.

Godin writes today about embracing the "lifetime value" of a customer. Open source projects may not have customers, but it pays to think about the lifetime value of users as well.

James Hall, of freeDOS fame, talks about how to run and maintain an open source project.

Since free software and other free culture products are formed by an organic, incrementalist process, they tend to be highly organic in their design as well. Free software is not so much built as it is grown.