What’s terrific when trying to find a hot new app to play with is that SourceForge tracks the popularity of projects based on several criteria. We'll look at two different criteria in this article.

The first lets you know what’s popular right now: at http://sourceforge.net/top/toplist.php?type=downloads_week you'll find the most downloaded programs during the last seven days.

At the time of writing, the top 10 most downloaded this week are

1. eMule (2,250,156 downloads)
2. Ares Galaxy (1,314,665)
3. Azureus (457,064)
4. GTK+ and The GIMP installers for Windows (309,402)
5. 7-Zip (271,772)
6. Audacity (270,995)
7. FileZilla (193,766)
8. emule Xtreme Mod (152,159)
9. Shareaza (148,052)
10. VirtualDub (129,449)

Interestingly, half of these – including the top three – are file-sharing peer-to-peer applications (must be all that Linux ISO P2P sharing I hear about!) They make up 82% of the top 10 downloads, with eMule contributing half that number alone. Of the other five, one is a Windows version of a popular Linux graphics package (The GIMP), one is a Zip compression manager (7-Zip), one is a prevalent audio editing/recording system (Audacity), one is an FTP client/server (FileZilla) and one is a desktop video editing package (VirtualDub). If you're looking for a new tool, try one of these. They're obviously popular.

As a side note, the number of downloads show open source is a big industry with a large installed user base. To give a meaningful comparison, one of the most ubiquitous programs downloaded, for Windows at least, would surely be WinZip. The primary distribution site is C|net who report 168,627,788 downloads across all time (http://www.download.com/WinZip/3000-2250_4-10665474.html). 168+ million is an enormous number and that reflects just how popular and how widespread WinZip is. However, remember that’s for all time:  SourceForge lists the top downloads over all time at http://sourceforge.net/top/topalltime.php?type=downloads and it can be seen eMule has a massive 326,226,298 downloads. That’s getting up to twice as many as WinZip or in other words for every time WinZip has been downloaded, eMule has been downloaded two times.

However, in terms of finding hot apps, this list is not actually so useful, because what’s useful changes over time as technologies emerge and operating systems mature. Consider CDex – this was an extremely important utility for extracting digital audio from CDs. It played an important part in the rise of CD ripping, which led to the prominence of mp3 files and players. It is the eighth most downloaded program of all time from SourceForge, but has much less value today with its capabilities available in so many other ways. In fact, even its own development team are spending little time on it, with it now ranking right down as the 725th active project on the site. In fact, even eMule isn’t on the top 50 active projects with bittorrents rapidly becoming the most prevalent P2P technology.

That leads us nicely to what is a very useful list, namely the most active projects. This reflects where development work is happening and which projects are making the most ground. A project’s activity represents software reaching maturity, having bugs fixed and responding to user feedback. What’s more, active projects are timely projects. They haven’t been abandoned over the ravages of time but are relevant now.

So, let’s take a walk through the ten most active SourceForge projects. Some of these may be known to you. I’m sure there’ll be some which are new. And hopefully, there’ll be at least one which strikes you as solving a genuine need you have right now. We’ll work our way up from number 10.