These Are the Hottest New Open Source Projects Right Now

Gobs of new open source projects are released every year, but only a few really capture the imaginations of businesses and developers.

Open source software management company Black Duck tries to spot these, measuring which projects attract the most contributors, produce the most code, and garner the most attention from the developer world at large.

Dubbed the Black Duck Rookies of the Year, the ranking isnt a perfect measure of the project popularity, but it can be can tell us a bit about where the world of open source is going. And thats no small thing. So much of the internetand the modern business worldnow runs on open source software, software thats freely shared with the world at large.

Judging from Black Ducks latest list, software developers are particularly interested in building widely distributed online applications that operate outside the control of big tech companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazonapplications like the bitcoin digital currency. Bitcoin is a system that runs across a vast network of machines thats outside the control of central banks or governments.

Software hacker types have long been interested in this sort of decentralization, but interest in such egalitarian operations has risen since NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden revealed the scope of the agencys surveillance activities. And its now at an all-time high.

According to Black Duck, one of last years most successful new projects was Storj, which aims to use bitcoins technology to help users store file online without sacrificing their privacy. Think of it as bitcoin meets Dropbox.

The idea is that youll upload your files to Storjs distributed cloud, but only youll be the only one with the keys to decrypt your data. Plus, you can sell your extra storage space to make money.

IPFSshort for InterPlanetary File Systemis even more ambitious. The project aims to create a censorship-resistant alternative to the web, taking inspiration from peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent.

And given all the uproar over the Silk Road, the bitcoin-based marketplace most famous for illicit drugs, its hardly surprising to see OpenBazaar on Black Ducks list. OpenBazaar could to do for e-commerce what BitTorrent did for file sharing: create a decentralized alternative that the government cant shut down.

But decentralization isnt the only thing developers are interested in. As the internet expands, theyre also hard at work on new software projects that can facilitate this expansionprojects that can help juggle enormous amounts of online traffic and data.

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These Are the Hottest New Open Source Projects Right Now