Are You Ready to Join the Ranks of Open Source Rookies?

Featured article by Patrick Carey, Director of Product Marketing, Black Duck Software

A lot of great software is being built using open source, and each year Black Duck reviews open source projects started during the past 12 months to recognize those whose mission, community growth, and market impact make them particularly notable. We call our selections the “Open Source Rookies,” and the process begins with an average 100-200 projects that meet those requirements of intriguing vision, ability to build a community, and value to the marketplace.

Our selection committee then takes a deep-dive into each project to winnow the list to a more manageable group of 25 finalists. We then try to conduct live interviews with each of the finalist project teams to ultimately select our Open Source Rookies of the Year.

At the close of this article, you’ll find out how your open source project could become a Rookie selection for 2016, and join some of the exciting companies already in the Rookie ranks, including:

Hashicorp Vault – Class of 2015

Last year we recognized Hashicorp, the team behind the popular development environment management solution, Vagrant, for the launch of Vault, a framework for securely storing, accessing, and managing secrets across an enterprise.

Kubernetes – Class of 2014

At the summer 2014 DockerCon, Google open sourced a container management tool, Kubernetes, that was developed specifically to meet the needs of the exponentially growing Docker ecosystem. Kubernetes has become the one of the most widely adopted orchestration solutions for management of large scale container-based deployments.

Docker – Class of 2013

Docker was a clear stand-out in 2013, and has revolutionized the way teams build scalable applications for the cloud. Since launch, Docker has raised an impressive $180M in venture funding. Many expect them to reach unicorn status if/when they go public.

Ansible – Class of 2012

With a simpler approach to system orchestration, sys-admins can do what they need to do with Ansible without turning the needed work into a complex, time-consuming task. Red Hat acquired Ansible in October of 2015.

Bootstrap and NuGet – Class of 2011

Two stand-out Rookies from 2011 are Bootstrap and NuGet. Bootstrap, a toolkit originated by Twitter, has become the foundation of many responsive websites, with base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation and more. NuGet is a free, open source developer-focused package management system for the .NET platform designed to simplify the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development.

OpenStack – Class of 2010

OpenStack is an open source, open standards platform for large scale cloud computing. If you use any cloud-based applications or services, there’s a good chance many are running on OpenStack.

Become a Rookie Candidate – Register Your Project on OpenHub

That’s a pretty impressive list, I think you’ll agree. Are there any open source projects launched in 2016 that will have a similar impact? Is it a project you’re working on? We pull data on Rookie candidates from a variety of sources, including our open source project database, OpenHub. If you haven’t already done so, make sure your project gets noticed by our selection committee by registering it on OpenHub, and I hope to be congratulating you as a 2016 Open Source Rookie early next year.