Black Duck Software Names 2011 Open Source Rookies of the Year

BURLINGTON, Mass., Jan. 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- 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 are stand-outs in the Black Duck Software 2011 Open Source Rookie of the Year list, announced today. The fourth annual Open Source Rookies of the Year program recognizes the top new open source projects initiated in 2011.

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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.

Highlights of this year's analysis include:

• 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 four percent.
• Javascript (28 percent), Java (14 percent) and Ruby (12 percent) were the languages of choice for the top 50 Open Source Rookies.
• 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.

The Black Duck 2011 Open Source Rookies of the Year include:

• Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of web applications and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation and more.
• BrowserID is part of Mozilla's exploration into an identity system that puts users in control, independent of any particular service provider. BrowserID is a secure, decentralized, open source, cross-browser way to sign onto websites using your email address. With BrowserID, users select from their various email addresses, giving them a consistent experience across all of their personas. BrowserID helps users keep their online experience secure and private through the browser by limiting the flow of information to what is strictly necessary to let users log in.
• Canvas is the only commercial open source learning management system and the only LMS native to the cloud. The Canvas LMS source code is primarily developed at Instructure, but is supported by a global community of developers that share Instructure's vision. Canvas leverages other modern technologies like HTML5, jQuery, OAuth, and numerous external service integrations. All of these high-performing best-of-the-web solutions, through Canvas, help educators and learners collaborate more effectively.
• Cloud Foundry is an open Platform-as-a-Service (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
• Moai, billed as the mobile platform for pro game developers, differentiates itself through its cloud-based game services and rapid development of iOS, Android, and Chrome titles, all built in the industry standard Lua scripting language. Moai developers appreciate the ability to write both client and server-side game logic without context switching or cross-team projects, as well as the open-source nature of the Moai SDK that ensures they can build titles without compromises. Previously announced game companies using Moai include Bungie Aerospace, Harebrained Schemes, DistinctDev, Go Go Kiddo and Nay Games.
• Mooege is an open source and freely available educational game server emulator written in C#.
• OpenShift is Red Hat's free, auto-scaling Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) built on open source technologies that enable developers to quickly deploy applications to the cloud. OpenShift supports many popular languages, frameworks and middleware components.
• 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.
• rstat.us - Microblogging has taken the world by storm, and rstat.us is the newest place to participate in the collective conscious of the planet. There are two things that make rstat.us special: simplicity and openness. Our interface is clean and easy to understand. We give you just enough features to be interesting, but not enough to be complicated and confusing.  The programming code that makes up rstat.us is available for anyone to download, free of charge. Programmers can use that code to run their own websites just like rstat.us, and you can subscribe to your friends on any site that supports the OStatus protocol, like identi.ca. This also means that you can own your data: we'll never stop you from having full access to everything you've put into rstat.us.
• Salt is an open source configuration management and remote execution application. Salt is written with the intent of making central system management and configuration as simple, yet as flexible as possible. Salt is the core application of the saltstack project.

"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 Software, the leading global provider of strategy, products and services for enabling enterprise scale adoption of open source software. "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."

"Another example of the importance of evidence based assessment and decision making," said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst and Co-founder, Redmonk. "The Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year program is an intriguing, quantitative measurement of project performance and traction."

Honorable Mentions

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 include:

• 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.

"Recognizing open source projects in their early stages is crucial to fostering the OSS community and encouraging innovation," said Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack Project Policy Board. 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."

For more information about the 2011 Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year, visit www.blackducksoftware.com/rookies. For more information about Black Duck Software, visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

About Black Duck Software

Black Duck Software is the leading provider of strategy, products and services for automating the management, governance and secure use of open source software, at enterprise scale, in a multi-source development process. Black Duck enables companies to shorten time-to-solution and reduce development costs while mitigating the management, compliance and security challenges associated with open source software. Black Duck Software powers Koders.com, the industry's leading code search engine for open source, and Ohloh.net, the largest free public directory of open source software and a vibrant web community of free and open source software developers and users. Black Duck is among the 500 largest software companies in the world, according to Softwaremag.com. For more information, visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

SOURCE Black Duck Software