Black Duck Announces 2012 Open Source Rookies of the Year Winners

Fifth Annual Open Source Rookies Award Identifies Most Promising Projects of 2012; Recognizes Trend toward Evolving Use of JavaScript, Continued Growth of Mobile

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Black Duck Software

Jan 30, 2013, 09:05 ET

BURLINGTON, Mass., Jan. 30, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Black Duck Software today announced the 2012 Open Source Rookies of the Year recognizing the top new open source projects initiated in 2012. The trusted partner for open source software adoption, management and governance, Black Duck reviewed thousands of open source projects started in 2012 to select this year's Open Source Rookies.

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Now in its fifth year, the Open Source Rookies program utilizes data on open source projects from Ohloh.net and the Black Duck^® KnowledgeBase™. Using a weighted scoring system, points were awarded based on project activity, commits pace, project team attributes, and other factors. Black Duck determined the top 10 projects following an audit of its findings and project scores.

Trends Driving This Year's Standout Open Source Projects
Three clear trends drove the success of the 2012 Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year:

Evolving JavaScript – There was significant growth in projects focused on evolving the development frameworks, platforms and tooling around JavaScript; in fact, five of the top 10 picks this year are JavaScript-related projects. Several of the projects are tackling similar problems, in some cases competing and in other cases working together, to advance the large-scale use of JavaScript for serious application development. The size of the organization behind these projects ranged in size, some starting from a single developer while others started within some of the biggest tech companies in the world.
Focus on Mobile – Three of this year's Rookies had a mobile focus, each tackling different aspects of the mobile ecosystem, from development frameworks to real-time video filtering to multi-touch gestures. JavaScript also overlapped in these projects with continued focus on the mobile web.
Language Choice – Python, Ruby and JavaScript were the standout languages this year.

The Black Duck 2012 Open Source Rookies of the Year Include:

Ansible –a radically simple configuration management, deployment, and ad-hoc task execution tool.
Chaplin.js – an architecture for JavaScript applications using the Backbone.js library, it provides a lightweight and flexible structure that features well-proven design patterns and best practices.
GPUImage –an iOS library that lets you apply GPU-accelerated filters and other effects to images, live camera video, and movies.
Hammer.js –a JavaScript library for multi-touch gestures, Hammer.js enables gestures for the web on mobile devices.
InaSAFE – produces realistic natural hazard impact scenarios for better planning, preparedness and response activities.
Yahoo! Mojito – a JavaScript MVC framework for mobile and Web applications running on client and server.
Sidekiq – provides simple, efficient message processing for Ruby.
Syte –simple but powerful packaged personal site that has social integrations like Twitter, GitHub, Tumblr, WordPress, Stack Overflow and more.
Twitter Bower – a package manager for the web that lets you easily install assets such as images, CSS, JS and manages dependencies for you.
TypeScript – a language for application-scale JavaScript development, providing a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.
Honorable Mention: DCPUToolChain – an assembler, compiler, emulator and Integrated Development Environment for the DCPU-16 virtual CPU.

"The 2012 Rookies demonstrate how community innovation, particularly within the JavaScript and mobile projects, mirrors the needs for innovation in web experiences, mobile devices and enterprise applications," said Black Duck President and CEO Tim Yeaton. "Being able to identify and showcase these up-and-coming open source projects is an important part of our mission at Black Duck to bring together the open source community and businesses around the world."

Past winners of the prestigious award include Twitter Bootstrap, Cloud Foundry, Mozilla Persona (formerly known as BrowserID), Red Hat OpenShift, Eclipse Orion, Apache Rave, Salt Stack, OpenStack, Diaspora and many other notable projects.

"The Black Duck Open Source Rookie of the Year award gave the Salt project and team a huge boost in 2012; not only was it great publicity, but it helped validate a young and growing project and helped give it the legs it needed to turn into one of the largest projects in the world during 2012," said Thomas S. Hatch, Founder, CTO, Salt Stack Inc. "This award has helped Salt grow from a basement project in the beginning of 2012 to a viable company making a real impact in 2013."

"We're thrilled to have a project included in the list this year again. What started out as an initial open source contribution to make it easier to do asset management on the web for us has grown into quite a lively project," said Chris Aniszczyk, Open Source Manager, Twitter, Inc. "We are thankful to the Yeoman (@yeoman) project for initially adopting Bower and the community that has built up around Bower. We look forward to where they take the project."

For more information about the 2012 Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year, please visit www.blackducksoftware.com/open-source-rookies.

About Black Duck
Offering award-winning software and consulting, Black Duck is the partner of choice for open source software adoption, governance and management. Enterprises of every size depend on Black Duck to harness the power of open source technologies and methods. As part of the greater OSS community, Black Duck connects developers to comprehensive OSS resources through Ohloh.net, and to the latest commentary from industry experts through the Open Source Delivers blog. Black Duck also hosts the Open Source Think Tank, an international event where thought leaders collaborate on the future of open source. Black Duck is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Mateo, St. Louis, 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 us at @black_duck_sw.