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Black Duck Software Announces Open Source Rookies of the Year
[January 27, 2015]

Black Duck Software Announces Open Source Rookies of the Year


Black Duck Software, the leading OSS Logistics solutions provider enabling the secure management of open source code, today announced its seventh annual Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year awards, which recognizes the top new open source projects initiated in 2014. This year's honorees span security, cloud storage, Bitcoin marketplaces, DevOps tools, and database management. The projects specifically address needs in the enterprise, consumer applications, and the Docker community.

Each year thousands of new open source projects are started, with only a handful garnering the attention and traction of the masses. Some projects gain traction by building off existing well-known technologies, while others truly break new ground. Many of these projects are created to solve a simple development problem, while others begin with loftier intentions, often commercially motivated. Black Duck Open Source (News - Alert) Rookies of the Year are selected irrespective of commercial motivations. They instead reflect projects that have demonstrated significant traction through developer contributions and involvement over the past year.

This year's honorees reflect important trends and dynamic contributions to the open source community. The Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year for 2014 are:

  • cAdvisor - analyzes resource usage and performance characteristics of running containers.
  • CockroachDB - a scalable, geo-replicated, transactional datastore.
  • CodeCombat - a multiplayer programming game for learning how to code.
  • DebOps - a collection of Ansible playbooks and roles, scalable from one container to an entire data center.
  • IPFS - a global, versioned, peer-to-peer file system.
  • Kubernetes - an open source container cluster manager used to accelerate development and simplify operations.
  • Neovim - the Vim text editor has been loved by a generation of users. Neovim is the next generation.
  • OpenBazaar - a decentralized marketplace for instantly trading with anyone using Bitcoin.
  • Storj - based on blockchain technology and peer-to-peer protocols, Storj provides the most secure, private, and encrypted cloud storage.
  • Terraform.io - a tool for building, changing, and combining infrastructure safely and efficiently.
  • Honorable Mentions: Drone-Ci, a Continuous Integration platform built on Docker and written in Go, and Docker Fig, which provides fast, isolated development environments using Docker.



"I'm always excited about publishing our annual Open Source Rookies of the Year report. It reflects the highly visible projects from well-known contributors, and also reveals hidden gems that often grow into important, meaningful projects," said Dave Gruber, Vice President, Product Management & Product Marketing, Black Duck Software (News - Alert). "Navigating the more than one million meaningful open source projects in the world is becoming an overwhelming task for developers today, so we are happy to help leverage the Black Duck KnowledgeBase and Black Duck Open Hub to identify a short-list of the newest up-and-comers from the past year."

The Black Duck Open Hub helps developers track community metrics for the world's open source projects. It reflects the vibrancy of each project, an important metric used during the selection process as developers consider the use of a new open source component. Open Hub also provides an open source "resume" for individual developers contributing to open source projects. Companies and organizations can also leverage Open Hub to publically aggregate their contributions to the many open source projects they participate in, demonstrating their overall contribution to the open source community.


As the world's most trusted partner for open source software adoption, management, and governance, Black Duck reviewed and analyzed thousands of open source projects to select this year's winners. Using a weighted scoring system, points were awarded based on project activity, commits pace, and several other factors.

Notable were the large number of Docker (2013 Rookie Winner) ecosystem projects started in 2014. While Kubernetes and cAdvisor made our top 10 list in 2014, many others also saw rapid community growth. Our data showed that the 2014 growth in collective participation in container-related projects trumped all others.

Past winners of the prestigious award include Docker, Twitter Bootstrap, Cloud Foundry, Red Hat (News - Alert) OpenShift, Eclipse Orion, Apache Rave, Salt Stack, OpenStack, Diaspora, and many other notable projects.

For more information about the Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year, and to learn more about Docker and important Docker ecosystem projects, register for the webinar "The Power of Containers: Open Source and the Docker Ecosystem" on March 11, 2015 at 2:00 p.m. ET: www.blackducksoftware.com/open-source-rookies.

About the Leading OSS Logistics Provider

Black Duck Software provides the world's only end-to-end OSS Logistics solution, enabling enterprises of every size to solve the logistical challenges and optimize the opportunities that come with open source adoption and management. As part of the greater open source community, Black Duck connects developers to comprehensive OSS resources through The Black Duck Open Hub (formerly Ohloh) and to the latest commentary from industry experts through the Open Source Delivers blog. Black Duck is headquartered in Boston and has offices in San Mateo, 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 the company at @black_duck_sw.


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