To me an open source project is 1% about the code and 99% about the community. Without a good community, you might as well not bother open sourcing the code.
I don't know how far this is true. I just checked Vim, which for me seem to be written mostly by one person (but I may be wrong here). Anyway, I'm quite sure there are some useful open source project which don't have a big community of developers. FSlint is one I use sometime.
