A couple of years ago things were looking pretty desolate for open source. Independent players were struggling with open source revenue models that relied solely on paid support. More important, outside of app dev, the excitement that once swirled around open source seemed in short supply.
Fast-forward to InfoWorld’s 2012 Best of Open Source Software awards (aka the Bossies) and you’ll see how dramatically things have changed. Open source is playing a leadership role across many categories — not only in app dev, but also in big data, the private cloud, and NoSQL databases. The old saw of “open source doesn’t innovate” has been retired forever.
Take the explosion in open source databases. You can’t get much hotter than MongoDB, the document database from 10gen, which wins a Bossie for the second year in a row. Not far behind is Couchbase, which InfoWorld’s Andrew Oliver calls “a great choice for an operational data store.” Then there’s Neo4J, Riak, and Redis, all three of which are starting to get the respect they deserve for serious applications.
Keywords: Couchbase • Infoworld • MongoDB • open source • Redis • Riak