Black Duck Software Delivers Its Open Source "Rookies of the Year"

by Sam Dean - Jan. 19, 2012Comments (0)

Black Duck Software, which focuses on management, governance and analytics for open source software deployments, is out with its "Rookies of the Year" list, naming the top 20 open source projects initiated last year. We've kept an eye on this report in past instances, and it usually surfaces several diamond-in-the-rough projects that you may not be so familiar with. This year's collection includes cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) projects, projects aimed at game developers, and more.

You can find Black Duck's complete collection of open source rookies here. Among the interesting new projects, Cloud Foundry, an open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providing a choice of cloud infrastructures, made the cut. We covered it here, and still like its prospects. OpenShift, which is Red Hat's auto-scaling Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) built on open source technologies and aimed at the cloud, also made the cut.

I hadn't heard of some of the Rookies of the Year. According to Black Duck: "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." Likewise, Black Duck notes that: "Mooege is an open source and freely available educational game server emulator written in C#."

Among other interesting rookies, Salt deserves attention. It 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.