Open Source Rookies of the Year for 2008
2008 was another banner year for open source. With software development teams looking to do more with less, we are continuously hearing reports of people considering way to reuse open source components in order to cut development time or costs. The breadth of activity in the open source community is nothing short of mind boggling. To the uninformed, open source = Linux, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of open source components that are high quality, but relatively unknown outside a tightly knit community. They cover the gamut from infrastructure to components to tools to applications. They are written in dozens of languages and work on a range of platforms from the tiny to the gargantuan.
Black Duck Software has amassed the industry’s largest KnowledgeBase of open source and other downloadable code, collected from nearly 4000 internet sites (and counting). The number of open source projects discovered is about 180,000. While there are many well known and well established projects, there is quite a bit of activity around new projects as well.
In fact, we counted over 17,000 projects from the class of 2008 – those projects that show a creation or registration date in 2008. 47% of these newly created projects used the C language. Java came in as the number two language of choice at nearly 28%. Third was Javascript at over 20%. In the world of scripting, nearly 18% of the projects chose to use Perl while only 11% used PHP. These were both higher than Python at nearly 10% and Ruby at 6%. Note, most projects used more than one language and these results are based on the number of projects using a given language, not the number of lines of code created.
We wrestled with an objective measure to identify the most interesting/promising projects. One way would be to look at the number of downloads, but many of these projects are brand new and they don’t necessarily have a following yet. We also could have looked at the amount of code written, but our anecdotal experience is that this would not necessarily select mature and robust projects versus those that are still emerging and undergoing significant improvement.
When a developer has something that they want to share, they tend to wrap it up in a tarball (or equivalent) and produce a release. We would expect projects that support a large number of releases to tend, more often than not, to have a more committed team of talented developers. Our view is that rookie projects that have a larger number of releases, and thus a greater amount of developer activity, are definitely worth further study.
About 57% of all rookie projects offered only a single downloadable release. The other projects averaged nearly four releases each, with the top 185 projects creating more than one release per month. It is true that some of these projects are leveraging previously existing open source development. For example, Beacon Cache is a new project that is based on Gnutella, but we decided, in the end, to include these as well. There is tremendous reuse in the open source world from project to project – that’s a good thing. Some of the world’s leading projects (Xerces, DOM4J, GNU Libtool) are literally each reused by thousands of other open source projects. Some of the most innovative work out there is a fork of something else. That is the essence of community development.
Below are the top 10 rookie projects ranked in order of the quantity of releases. For fun, we’ll call them the 2008 open source rookies of the year. You will notice that, like the greater open source universe, these projects include infrastructure, applications, tools and components that can be used in a wide range of embedded and enterprise systems.
Open Source in Mobile Applications
Another interesting development is the number of new open source projects for mobile platforms We easily counted over 120 new open source projects focusing on the mobile market. There were over 40 new open source projects targeting the iPhone. Here is a small sample of iPhone projects ranked in order of quantity of releases. A good number of these are software components that developers are writing for the benefit of other developers. As we said above, open source is all about reuse.
Open Source Rookies of the Year for 2008 
