How Members of Black Duck’s Open Source Rookie Club Are Faring Today

by Darryl K. Taft

Docker, a 2013 open-source rookie, enables developers to pack, ship and run any application as a lightweight container. “We’re honored to be recognized with a Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year award—a wonderful way to cap off our stellar first year as an open-source project,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Docker, in 2013. Today, Docker has exploded into one of the most watched projects on GitHub and boasts a community size of more than 100 million Docker engine downloads and over 75,000 “Dockerized” applications in the Docker Hub.

Ansible, a simple configuration management, deployment and ad-hoc task execution tool, was chosen as a 2012 rookie of the year for having the largest amount of contributors for any first-year project in 2012. At the time, the project had 126 contributors, 915 GitHub stars and 251 forks. In two years, Ansible has grown to 400 contributors, 9,000 GitHub stars and 2,870 forks. “While many of these projects are led by veterans, getting more eyes on an open-source project is an important goal for any of us,” said Michael DeHaan, former CTO of AnsibleWorks and founder of Ansible in 2012.

A 2011 open-source rookie of the year, Canvas is a commercial open-source learning management system native to the cloud. When the virtual learning environment was open sourced, the company behind the project, Instructure, serviced more than 100 educational institutions. Today, the startup, with more than 500 employees, is making a real difference for over 1,000 teachers and students.

Cloud Foundry is an open platform-as-a-service (PaaS), providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. Owned and operated by Pivotal, this 2011 Open Source Rookie of the Year recently posted record-breaking $40 million annual revenue for 2014. Starting with just 65 contributors in 2011, the open-source solution has grown to a community of 1,600 contributors.

OpenShift is Red Hat’s free auto-scaling PaaS that enables developers to quickly deploy applications to the cloud. When the project was selected as a rookie of the year in 2011, it was 153 days old and had just 10 contributors. Today, the project has more than 200 contributors and has received high industry recognition by winning multiple best in technology awards.

Salt is an open-source configuration management and remote execution application. Salt was written with the intent of making central system management and configuration as simple, yet as flexible, as possible. This DevOps tool was nominated as a 2011 Open Source Rookie of the Year with just 29 contributors. Today, the SaltStack organization represents a suite of infrastructure management tools and was named to GitHub’s Octoverse list as one of the largest open-source projects in the world for the past two consecutive years.

VoltDB, a 2010 Open Source Rookie of the Year, is a fast, scalable, open-source NewSQL database. Today, VoltDB powers telecom policy and billing applications, sensor applications like smart grid power systems, real-time digital advertising platforms, analytics for online gaming, and applications for risk, fraud and security detection. The project managers behind VoltDB, which was nominated with just 12 contributors, created a successful commercial entity to support their original open-source proof of concept.

NuGet is an 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. This 2010 Open Source Rookie of the Year humbly began with 15 contributors and even a different project name. Today, this project has more than 3 hundred million package downloads and a large community following.

OpenStack is an open-source, open standards cloud computing platform, backed by Rackspace and NASA, for building reliable cloud infrastructure. This 2010 Open Source Rookie of the Year has more than 3,000 contributors working on the software to provide cloud solutions to corporations and organizations worldwide. The OpenStack organization supports a large ecosystem of open-source projects and tools and hosts yearly summits throughout the globe on cloud computing.

The OpenDaylight Project is a collaborative open-source project that aims to accelerate adoption of software-defined networking (SDN) and create a solid foundation for network functions virtualization (NFV) for a more transparent approach that fosters new innovation and reduces risk. This networking tool is managed by the Linux Foundation and was awarded a 2013 Open Source Rookie award. Today, the organization boasts 290 contributors and 44 member companies that helped host the first OpenDaylight Summit in 2014.