I could spend hours going on about how awesome open source projects are, but I doubt anyone wants to read that. Fortunately, Klint Finley has posted an article on Wired that lists and describes some of the most promising open source projects that are out there right now, including many from Google and former Google employees.
Gobs of new open source projects are released every year, but only a few really capture the imaginations of businesses and developers. Open source software management company Black Duck tries to spot these, measuring which projects attract the most contributors, produce the most code, and garner the most attention from the developer world at large. Dubbed the Black Duck Rookies of the Year, the ranking isn’t a perfect measure of the project popularity, but it can be can tell us a bit about where the world of open source is going. And that’s no small thing. So much of the internet–and the modern business world—now runs on open source software, software that’s freely shared with the world at large.
