There is an interesting presentation up at the Silent Penguin blog, which discusses a companies journey in the Open Source Arena , the author mattew tracks the progress from 2000, when they forayed into the open source space till date, explaining how they went on to make "Economic Sense" from Open Source.

One of the slides highlights how Open Source Projects were evaluated, pre blog/pre OSBC periods :

• Licensing
• How healthy was it
• How many developers
• Founder still around
• When was last check-in
• When was last release
• How many installations
• Is there a roadmap
• How frequented is the mailing-list

Here is an another interesting slide from the presentation.

Prashanth Raivia Source