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Black Duck Software has announced its 2011 Open Source Rookies of the Year list of the top 10 new open-source projects to hit the streets.
The list, released Jan. 18, features two open-source cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) projects, two projects tailored to the needs of game developers and a toolkit to aid social media application developers in the creation of Web apps. The Black Duck Software 2011 Open Source Rookie of the Year list is the fourth annual run of the company’s rundown of the top new projects out there.
Using data on open-source projects from Ohloh.net and the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, Black Duck reviewed thousands of open-source projects started in 2011 to select the Open Source Rookies of the Year. Using a weighted scoring system, points were awarded based on commit activity–commits per day, size of the project team and the number of in-bound links to the project. Black Duck determined the top 10 projects following an audit of its findings and normalization of scores.
“The data underlying the 2011 Open Source Rookies list is consistent with shifts we see in our day-to-day business, where cloud, mobile and gaming draw great support from involved communities of open-source developers,” said Tim Yeaton, president and CEO of Black Duck, in a statement. “The key observation-that open source is driving innovation across many industries-shows the power of the open-source community model and the increasing importance of social development, where developers are supported by social communities connected through social media.”
Nine of the top 10 and 56 percent of the top 50 projects are now on github. In 2010, just four of the top 10 and 32 percent of the top 50 projects were on github, a major shift in just one year. In the balance of the top 50 projects, GoogleCode was the repository for 10 percent, followed by SourceForge at 4 percent.
VMware’s CloudFoundry is one of the better known names on the list. CloudFoundry is an open PaaS providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. Initiated by VMware with broad industry support, Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. It is an open-source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances
Another well known project on the list is The Eclipse Foundation’s Orion project. Orion is a browser-based open tool integration platform built by the Eclipse platform team and focused on moving software development to the Web as a Web experience. Orion addresses the core coding activities–code editing, project navigation, search and working with your source control system–and provides extensibility mechanisms to allow application-level linking with other Web-based tools.
Regarding languages, 28 percent of the top 50 open-source rookie projects are written in JavaScript, 14 percent are written in Java and 12 percent are written in Ruby. Three of the top 10 new projects in 2011 use the Apache License, Version 2.0, and one each chose the GPLv2, GNU AGPLv3, SpringSource License, Eclipse Public License, Mozilla Public License Version 1.1, WTFPL, and the Common Public Attribution License.
Other top 10 rookie of the year projects for 2011 include Bootstrap, a toolkit from Twitter designed to kick start development of Web applications and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation and more. Another one is BrowserID, which is part of Mozilla’s exploration into an identity system that puts users in control, independent of any particular service provider. Browser ID is a secure, decentralized, open-source, cross-browser way to sign onto Websites using your email address. And another top rookie is Canvas, a commercial open-source learning management system. Canvas leverages other modern technologies such as HTML5, jQuery, OAuth, and numerous external service integrations. Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS also made the top 10 list.
Other projects rounding out the Black Duck Software 2011 Open Source Rookie of the Year list were: Moai, a mobile platform for pro game developers; Mooege, an open-source and freely available educational game server emulator written in C#; the rstat.us microblogging platform; and Salt, an open-source configuration management and remote execution application.
“Another example of the importance of evidence-based assessment and decision making,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst and co-founder of Redmonk, in a statement. “The Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year program is an intriguing, quantitative measurement of project performance and traction.”
“Recognizing open-source projects in their early stages is crucial to fostering the OSS community and encouraging innovation,” said Jonathan Bryce, chairman of the OpenStack Project Policy Board, in a statement. OpenStack was a 2010 Open Source Rookie of the Year, and new core project OpenStack Dashboard, code-name Horizon, garnered Honorable Mention in 2011. “It is exciting to see OpenStack included in the Black Duck Open Source Rookie of the Year program for the second consecutive year.”
Meanwhile, in addition to the Open Source Rookies of the Year, Black Duck identified three projects that deserve Honorable Mention due to their outstanding rate of commits and team support. These are:
- Apache Rave, a podling under development in the Apache Incubator, Apache Rave is a new Web and social mashup engine. It will provide an out-of-the-box as well as an extendible lightweight Java platform to host, serve and aggregate (Open) Social Gadgets and services through a highly customizable and Web 2.0 friendly front-end. Rave is targeted as an engine for internet and intranet portals and as a building block to provide context-aware personalization and collaboration features for multi-site/multi-channel (mobile) oriented and content driven Websites and (social) network oriented services and platforms.
- OpenStack Dashboard, code-name Horizon provides a baseline user interface for managing OpenStack services. It is a reference implementation built using the django-openstack project which contains all of the core functionality needed to develop a site-specific implementation.
- Rudder is a new open-source tool in the configuration management domain. Specifically aimed at drift assessment, it addresses automation, ongoing verification and repairs, centralizing information and knowledge about your infrastructure, compliance reporting thus helping to keep drift from nominal behavior low. In a nutshell, clearly separated tasks permit technical experts to create configuration templates for the tools they know best, thus letting non-experts leverage this power via a modern Web interface, such as: architects or security officers who implement policy, junior sysadmins who use and reuse such policies to setup services, and pretty much anyone who digs into real-time compliance reports and error logs.