Well, here we are, another year almost done for. Time to look back and
take stock of the year that was. You know what? It turns out that 2011
was a banner year for open source projects. So much so, that picking the
10 most important was pretty difficult.
So what do I mean by "important," anyway? Clearly, it's not just
projects that are widely used. That list would be just too long to even
contemplate. You'd have to include Apache, GCC, X.org, Debian, Fedora,
openSUSE, Linux Mint, not to mention a bazillion and one libraries and
utilities that we depend on every day.
So to judge importance, I looked at projects that are influential,
gaining in popularity, and/or technical standouts in new areas. In other
words, projects that are even more noteworthy than the other noteworthy
projects. This means that many projects that are crucial didn't make
the list. And now, in no particular order, the 10 most important
projects of 2011.
Hadoop
Hadoop Logo
Without a doubt,
Hadoop has had a fantastic year. The distributed computing platform from Apache has seen massive uptake and industry support.
Hadoop is being used and/or supported by almost every enterprise
player. Naturally it's big with Yahoo, the company that started the
project, but it's also being used by Amazon, IBM, Twitter, Facebook, and
just about any other company that's working with Big Data.
Hadoop isn't new, of course, but this year it really seemed to take off
as an industry standard. Kind of like Linux, when you think about it...
This year EMC, Oracle, and even Microsoft announced commercial support
or products that work with Hadoop, and Yahoo spun off HortonWorks to
focus on Hadoop. It's almost easier to name companies that
aren't working with Hadoop than ones that are.
Git
Speaking of ubiquity, how about that
Git,
huh? Linus Torvalds other little hobby project has not only done good
for Linux, but it's hugely popular for FOSS projects. If you're working
on a new open source project, the odds are pretty good that you're going
to be using Git over any other distributed version control system
(DVCS).
Git isn't just a popular tool, it's the foundation of one of the most
popular gathering spots around the Web for open source development:
GitHub. It's also being used and offered by
Gitorious, SourceForge.net, Google Code Hosting, and pretty much every other major platform for hosting FOSS projects.
Cassandra
Was 2011 the peak of noSQL as a buzzword, or was that 2010? It's so hard to keep track, but
Apache Cassandra deserves a slot in the top 10 this year buzzword or no.
If you're not familiar with Cassandra, it's a scalable, distributed, and fault-tolerant database that takes cues from
Amazon's Dynamo (PDF) and
Google's BigTable database system.
Cassandra has been
adopted by an impressive list of users including IBM, Netflix, Digg, Facebook, Rackspace, and many others.
LibreOffice
The
LibreOffice team has done
a great job of keeping the OpenOffice.org torch burning after the Sun
acquisition. While Apache is working to continue OpenOffice.org,
LibreOffice picked up the ball and ran with it. The project has
delivered release after release, not only with a slew of new features
but also with reliable updates for major versions that are exactly what
organizations that depend on an office suite need.
For anybody that's interested in running Linux on the desktop,
LibreOffice has been a crucial project. For users who want to get away
from Microsoft Office, but still have compatibility with Office file
formats, LibreOffice has been there for them.
Not only has LibreOffice done well technically, it's also
moved forward with impressive speed as an organization. 2012 should be an interesting year for the open source office suite.
OpenStack
Few projects have taken off quite like
OpenStack. The "cloud operating system" kicked off by RackSpace has signed up (at this count)
144 companies to work on OpenStack, including SUSE and Canonical.
OpenStack is designed to provide the components that any organization
would need to use to deploy their own private or public cloud: Compute,
object storage, image service, and (newer) identity management and a GUI
dashboard.
Now, you're not going to see much OpenStack in deployment yet — but it's definitely a project to watch for open source cloud.
An honorary mention goes to Eucalyptus, though. While OpenStack has
oodles of momentum and industry support, Eucalyptus has production
deployments and Amazon Web Services compatibility. This is not an area
where it's a "zero sum" game — there's room for several players, and I
suspect that Eucalyptus will be around for a very long time as well.
Nginx
Apache (more accurately,
the Apache HTTP Server Project)
still rules the Web with an iron fist. OK, it's more like a velvet
glove, but Apache is definitely far and away the most popular Web
server. But 2011 was a huge year for
Nginx, an alternative Web server that excels at HTTP and reverse proxy serving.
Nginx reached
a lifetime peak of 8.85% market share this year on the Netcraft Server Survey. According to this
profile on Royal Pingdom, the usage for Nginx has jumped nearly 300%.
The little server that could reached another major milestone this year as well. Specifically,
Nginx went corporate and started offering commercial support.
It's being used by some of the biggest sites in the world, including
Dropbox, WordPress.com, Facebook, and about 25% of the world's busiest
sites.
jQuery
You can't swing a cat these days without hitting a Web developer using
jQuery. Not that you should go around swinging cats, of course. jQuery is a JavaScript library that's
massively popular. In fact, it's
considered the most widely used JavaScript library in the world.
If you're working with JavaScript, you've probably touched on jQuery
this year. As of late, it's come into criticism and some folks have
tried to slim it down, but jQuery is still the go-to for many developers.
Node.js
Another JavaScript entry for the top 10, you'd almost think that Web development was important this year or something.
Node.js is built on
Google's V8 JavaScript engine and is designed to be "an easy way to build scalable network programs."
Node.js is another big win for open source industry acceptance –
sponsored by Joyent, it has a healthy community of contributors and is
used by everybody from LinkedIn to
37Signals, Rdio, Yahoo, and GitHub.
Puppet
Another set of watch-words for 2011?
DevOps, and IT automation. While there are a number of excellent open source IT automation offerings out there, this year belonged to
Puppet.
Puppet is an "
automated administrative engine"
primarily aimed at Linux and UNIX-like systems. It can be used to
perform administrative tasks across two, twenty, or two thousand
computers. (Probably even more.) Puppet has been steadily growing and
improving for years, but this year Puppet went after the enterprise big
time with its Puppet Enterprise offering. It's also gotten a big vote of
confidence in the form of an investment from Google Ventures, Cisco,
and VMware. Puppet hasn't just been important in 2011, expect it to be
big in 2012, too. (And if you're a system administrator hunting for
work, you probably want Puppet on your resume along with our next
entry.)
Linux
Linux, the kernel, has had a pretty good year. What am I talking about? Linux had a
great year. It turned 20, hit 3.0 (
not coincidentally) and continued merrily on the path to world domination.
Sure, we kid about world domination – but have you looked around
lately? Linux is everywhere. It's powering phones and all kinds of
embedded devices. It's the bedrock of cloud services, and dominates the
TOP500 supercomputer list.
Google, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, countless government agencies,
businesses, and educational institutions depend on Linux for
mission-critical services. The long and short of it is, without Linux,
many of the other projects we depend on simply wouldn't have been
possible. It's the rock-solid foundation that people use to build so
many important services. (And not-so-important, too.)
No Android?
While I was compiling this list, I thought hard about putting Android
on. It's hard to argue that Android is unimportant in 2011, isn't it?
Absolutely. It's also, unfortunately, hard to make a strong case for
Android
as an open source project.
Sure, Google lobs some source over the wall when it gets around to it –
but Android development happens mostly behind closed doors. There's
little opportunity for the millions of Android fans and potential
hackers around the world to influence Android development unless they
happen to work for Google or one of its partner companies.
It's great that Google releases the code, but it's more of a "source open" project than an open source project.
All the Rest
As I said, there's just not room for every open source project that's
important to somebody. But maybe I missed a project that had a stand-out
2011? If you have a project that qualifies, let us know in the
comments. And while you're at it, what do you think for 2012? What
projects will be most important then?
Directly copied from
https://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/196-zonker/524082-the-10-most-important-open-source-projects-of-2011
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