Black Duck honors best of 19,000 new open source projects
There were over 19,000 projects for them to evaluate.
(Baseball renamed its rookie awards for Jackie Robinson, who won the first national rookie award in 1947, in 1987. (Picture from Wikipedia.) Douglas Adams later used Robinson's number 42 as the answer to the universe in his popular Hitchhiker's Guide series.)
To get its Top 10 list Black Duck created a scoring system that awards points for the number of releases within a project, the number of developers involved, and the number of web sites linked to the project.
Activity, hard work and buzz all play a part in a project's success, so those sound like good metrics.
Director of product marketing Eran Strod added some honorable mentions, including Android, which actually debuted in 2008. (They don't have a time on the roster metric like baseball. Debuts are debuts.) He notes there are now 295 projects with Android in their title.
Strod also gave a shout-out to BabBot, a bot created for World of Warcraft; Cahoots!, a community-building platform written in PHP; Foswiki, a fork from twiki.org and Termtter, a Terminal-based Twitter client.
The envelopes please:
- Live Android - for those who want to try Android without buying a phone, Live Android lets the user run Android on his or her PC without affecting other files.
- Open Health Natural Language Processing - developed by the Mayo Clinic and IBM, the project gives medical clinicians and researchers access to unstructured textual documents (e.g., pathology reports, clinical notes, etc.)
- Mobile Browser Definition File - provides all the information needed to adaptively render content for mobile phones and devices, presenting server applications with a set of 67 capabilities or properties - from screen size to cookie support - to describe a mobile client device.
- Redis (REmote Dictionary Server) - An advanced key-store database which supports very fast, persistent access to a dataset. A simple way of storing data and a concept that can scale to the cloud.
- Smasher - Audio loop slicer designed to create striking effects from WAV, MP3, FLAC or AIFF files in seconds without a sequencer. Effects include filter sweeps, phasing, flanging, delay, and distortion.
- AbiCloud - Infrastructure software for the creation and integral management of public and private clouds based on heterogeneous environments. The project aims to offer users a tool with the capacity for scaling, management, automatic and immediate provision of servers, storage, networks, and virtual network devices, as well as applications.
- Transdroid - Remote torrent client for Android that supports faster downloads of large video, audio or software files.
- Rainmeter - This customizable PC resource meter can display various performance data in different formats. Rainmeter can measure CPU load, allocated memory, network traffic, performance data, uptime, free disk space, and more.
- TweetCraft - This World of Warcraft add-on enables players to send and receive tweets using Twitter without leaving the game; automatically upload and post screenshots using TwitPic (shares photos on Twitter) and automatically tweet certain in-game events such as achievements.
- Native Client - Runs x86 native code in web applications, with the goal of ensuring browser neutrality, OS portability, and safety.
No word on this, but maybe they could send the developers some sort of plaque, or trophy, or one of those frozen black ducks they have in the Chinese markets. (Cooked, of course.) Maybe next year.
One more point. While two of the top 10, and two more honorable mentions here, are on Sourceforge, three are based at Google Code and two more are at Microsoft's CodePlex. The others have their own forges, or at least their own forge URLs.