There has been a recent intensification in the trend of deleting software-related articles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion_sorting/Software). I think this is a useful enterprise, in order to declutter Wikipedia of dead projects or software with very little information to go about it.
Among those deletions there have been cases of articles on active software projects, with large user bases, being deleted on grounds of lack of notability (e.g. [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Foswiki]]).
In order to assess notability, I'm wondering about the particular situation of open-source software. OSS benefits from instant verifiability, in that anyone can download the code and check the claims in the article. Sure, an editor writing in detail about their discoveries this way would constitute WP:OR. On the other hand, fact checking in comparison tables simply requires referencing the software's documentation, or live demos - see [[Comparison of JavaScript frameworks]].
Often, the size of developer base, and automatically-generated statistics about the project longevity and activity can be found on sites such as Ohloh (example for [[Foswiki]] - https://www.ohloh.net/projects/foswiki) or GitHub (example for [[MojoMojo]] - http://github.com/marcusramberg/mojomojo/). Most such software is not the "subject of multiple, reliable, independent, non-trivial, published works", and most can never be. For example, the [[Mediawiki]] article does not satisfy these criteria, but nobody doubts its notability.
Having in mind the above, what do fellow editors think about open-source software under active development and with a sizable developer community and user base: can it satisfy [[Wikipedia:Inherent notability]]?
Best regards, Dan Dascalescu ([[User:Dandv]])