BURLINGTON, Mass., Jan. 28, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Black Duck Software today announced the Open Source Rookies of the Year. The sixth annual Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year awards recognize the top new open source projects initiated in the past year. This year's Open Source Rookies honorees span cloud and software virtualization, privacy, social media, and Internet of Things projects addressing needs in the enterprise, government, gaming and consumer applications, among others, and reflect important trends in the open source community.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121025/NE99895LOGO)

The Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year are:

• Appium – a test automation framework for mobile applications
• Docker – enables developers to pack, ship, and run any application as a lightweight container
• Exercism – crowd-sourced code reviews on daily practice problems
• Ghost – a publishing platform that is beautifully designed, easy to use, and free for everyone
• InfluxDB – a distributed, time series, events, and metrics database with no external dependencies
• OpenDaylight – a collaborative open source project that accelerates adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and creates a solid foundation for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)
• OpenIoT – enables a new range of open, large-scale intelligent Internet of things (IoT) applications using a utility cloud computing delivery model
• Serverspec – RSpec tests for your servers configured by Puppet, Chef, or anything else
• Tox – secure instant messaging, video conferencing, and more
• XPrivacy – prevents Android-based applications from leaking privacy sensitive data and can restrict the categories of data applications can access
• Honorable Mention: Twitter Flight – a lightweight, component-based JavaScript framework that maps behavior to DOM nodes

"Shining the spotlight on these important new projects to both recognize their impact and enhance the projects' reach is a key element of our commitment to the open source community and all our stakeholders," said Dave Gruber, Vice President, Product Management & Product Marketing, Black Duck. "What makes this year's list so exciting is that our honorees highlight numerous areas at the very heart of the open source movement. From projects dedicated to directly helping developers like Docker to educational and altruistic projects like Exercism to projects enhanced and influenced by businesses like OpenDaylight, they are all represented on this list."

Trends Driving This Year's Standout Open Source Projects
Themes reflected by the Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year projects include:

• Cloud and Software Virtualization – As the use of virtualization and cloud becomes commonplace for today's IT infrastructure, new deployment and management challenges arise. Chef, Puppet, Salt (2011 Rookie), and Ansible (2012 Rookie) provided cloud deployment and configuration management solutions, helping with core configuration and management of large-scale cloud deployments. Docker provides a virtual container that packages an app and its dependencies so it can run on any Linux server, creating a new level of application portability using a lightweight virtualization approach. But while virtualization makes it fast and easy to deploy and scale, it creates new challenges for networking, spawning the need for SDNs and the creation of the OpenDaylight project, garnering serious contributions from some of the world's leading network providers. And through the use of Serverspec, developers can now run automated test scripts for server configuration across large-scale server deployments.
• Privacy – The security and privacy of our personal information continues to be a major focus, from those wishing to communicate under restrictive governments to the need to protect the personal information stored on our smartphones. Two of this year's Rookies will help – locking down private data on Android mobile devices with XPrivacy and providing secure instant messaging using Tox.
• Social Media – As social media continues to grow and mature, new, more flexible solutions are emerging for blogging and messaging. Ghost provides a new open source blogging alternative, while the rapid expansion of timeline-based data produced in social media creates the need for new kinds of data storage and access, spawning projects like InfluxDB. We also discovered a gem of a social learning tool for coding called Exercism, started by a software development instructor who wanted her students to learn in a more social way. 
• Internet of Things – As the Internet of Things continues to gain momentum, connecting the world's devices, projects like OpenIoT are defining important communications standards that will enable billions of devices to interact seamlessly.

"As a past winner of Black Duck's Open Source Rookies of the Year award, I greatly appreciate what Black Duck is doing to highlight emerging projects in the open source community," said Michael DeHaan, CTO of AnsibleWorks and project lead for Ansible. "While many of these projects are led by veterans, getting more eyes on an open source project is an important goal for any of us. Black Duck is providing an invaluable service by helping users and potential contributors find exciting new projects and accelerate the pace of innovation across the board."

The trusted partner for open source software adoption, management and governance, Black Duck reviewed thousands of open source projects to select this year's winners. The Open Source Rookies program utilizes data on open source projects from Ohloh.net and the Black Duck® KnowledgeBase™. Using a weighted scoring system, points were awarded based on project activity, commits pace, project team attributes, and other factors. Black Duck determines the top 10 projects following an audit of its findings and project scores.

"We're honored to be recognized with a Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year award – a wonderful way to cap off our stellar first year as an open source project," said Ben Golub, CEO, Docker.

For more information about the Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year, please visit www.blackducksoftware.com/open-source-rookies.

About Black Duck Software
Offering award-winning software and consulting, Black Duck is the partner of choice for open source software adoption, governance and management. Enterprises of every size depend on Black Duck to harness the power of open source technologies and methods.  As part of the greater OSS community, Black Duck connects developers to comprehensive OSS resources through Ohloh.net, and to the latest commentary from industry experts through the Open Source Delivers blog. Black Duck also hosts the Open Source Think Tank, an international event where thought leaders collaborate on the future of open source. Black Duck is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Mateo, St. Louis, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing. For more information about how to leverage open source to deliver faster innovation, greater creativity and improved efficiency, visit www.blackducksoftware.com and follow us at @black_duck_sw.

SOURCE Black Duck Software