The sixth annual Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year awards recognize the top open source projects initiated in the past year. This year’s Open Source Rookies honorees span cloud and software virtualization, privacy, social media, and Internet of things projects that address needs in the enterprise, government, gaming, and consumer applications, reflecting important trends in the open source community.
Projects considered as candidates include those with a first commit date on or after Jan 1, 2013. Using project data tracked on Black Duck’s Ohloh community site, a weighted ranking is applied based on the total number of commits, commiters, distribution of commits across committers, watchers/forks/stars, and social media traffic. The results are then filtered to eliminate projects that solve atomic, discrete problems (such as individual UI components written in HTML and JavaScript). We also screen out projects that are purely commercially driven, with committers from a single company only.