Most empirical studies about Open Source (OS)projects or products are vertical and usually deal with the flagship, successful projects.There is a substantial lack of horizontal studies to shed light on the whole population of projects,including failures.This paper presents a horizontal study aimed at characterizing OS projects. We analyze a sample of around 400 projects from a popular OS project repository.Each project is characterized by a number of attributes.We analyze these attributes statically and over time. The main results show that few projects are capable of attracting a meaningful community of developers.The majority of projects is made by few (in many cases one) person with a very slow pace of evolution.