Bossies 2015:the Best of Open Source software Awards

InfoWorld editors and contributors pick the top open source software for data centers, clouds, developers, data crunchers, and IT Pros

Whenever hear someone complain about developer productivity, just slap them. Have slogged through hundreds of open source projects each year for the past several years, I can assure you that Develo Pers is extremely productive. Every time we put together this package--InfoWorld's annual Best of Open Source Awards, aka the Bossies--I end up Wish ING developers were just a little less in the ball.

Of course I had help. InfoWorld is fortunate to draw on many contributors who work as software developers, systems integrators, data scientists, Security consultants, and networking gurus in real life. If there ' s an open source tool in their domain they don ' t already know, they ' re eager to dive in. Thanks to the hard work of these experts, our bossies encompass some-winners in six categories:

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• Bossie Awards 2015:the Best Open source applications
• Bossie Awards 2015:the Best Open source application development tools
• Bossie Awards 2015:the Best open source Big Data tools
• Bossie Awards 2015:the Best Open source data center and cloud software
• Bossie Awards 2015:the Best Open source desktop and mobile software
• Bossie Awards 2015:the Best Open source networking and security software

Where do we find all of these winners? We hang out with the places that open source gathers. We take the conferences, we hit the meetups, we climb the mountains of open source known as GitHub and Sourceforge-A nd the hill of Open source, CodePlex. (RIP, Google Code.) We never miss OSCON, and wherever we go, we keep our eyes and our ears open. When a leading light such as Joyent ' s Bryan Cantrill reveals a tech crush (Rethinkdb, recently), we zero in for a close lo Ok.

Some winners is inescapable. Docker had stolen every show that developers had attended for the last months. And the Docker vortex have drawn a number of other new projects into the mix, as containers spark some radical rethinking O f the operating system, the structure of applications, and how to monitor and manage all of the moving parts.

Other winners, like RETHINKDB, sneak up on us. Just when you begin to think some part of the technology landscape are settling, a new project emerges to shake it up again . RETHINKDB is one of a number of young projects that suggest there are much more to come in the world of postrelational data Bases.

We had no illusions that the Hadoop ecosystem is stabilizing, and sure enough, big data continues to explode. A number of new data analysis projects make their bossies debut this year, some of them friends of Hadoop and some not. More real-time approaches to distributed data processing is kicking MapReduce to the curb, and for the first time since 2 012, Hadoop itself is isn't among our winners.

Dev tools, databases, desktop apps, apps to run your business – free, Professional-grade software are falling from the sky . All of the pick it up and use it. Open source Licensing and the collaborative efforts of countless development teams (and the companies that employ them) AR E Fueling an incredible boom in business software development. With our bossies, we offer a-guide-to-the-best open source projects the boom has produced.

Doug dineley- Executive Editor

Doug Dineley is a executive editor at InfoWorld, where he manages reviews.

Bossies 2015:the Best of Open Source software Awards