Bossie Awards 2010: The best open source software of the year

“It is now roughly 40-plus years since Richard Stallman released
his text editor with the words “Emacs General Public License” in
the documentation and 20 some years since the world first saw the
phrase “Gnu General Public License.” Back in those days, finding
the best open source software was relatively simple. There was
Emacs, and then came vi. Choosing between them was never easy, and
many still argue over the best editor.

“In 2010, the choices aren’t any easier, and now there are many,
many more packages available. Sourceforge.net claims more than
310,000 projects and GitHub more than 1 million. Before going much
further, let us apologize profusely for not sorting through the
millions of projects to find all of the very best.

“If finding all of the absolute best piles of code isn’t
possible, then let me be more precise. The word “best” here can
mean many things. It is sometimes equivalent to “most promising,”
“most surprising”, “most subversive,” “most unnerving,” “most
opportune,” “most happening,” or some weird, inchoate mixture of
them all. The one thing it always means is “most useful” — to
developers, IT administrators, and users on a business
network.”

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