Top open source projects of 2012

1. Apache Hadoop

Used by: Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay

Whatever may it be, 2012 has been the year of the ‘Hadoops’ and there is no second thoughts on that. This year the tech world saw several customers dying to use the technology. Companies like Hortonworks, Cloudera and MapR made the news, but what caught the headlines was conglomerate IBM’s thoughts in using the Hadoop technology.

Created by Doug Cutting, Apache Hadoop is considered as one of the best in storing the structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. Constructed to be an open source software framework for data-intensive distributed applications, the Apache Hadoop uses a series of nodes to store the data. Named after his son’s toy elephant, Cutting structured a MapReduce facility with a distributed file system to meet the multi processing requirements of his firm, Nutch.

2. MongoDB

Used by: Etsy, Disney, Craigslist, Foursquare, the New York Times

The year 2012 saw big data revolutionizing the enterprise space. With the development of relational databases and big data analytics, the race for the top spot in the NoSQL segment has been lately heating up. And one such competitor who definitely needs mention is MongoDB. Even its competitors have acknowledged MongoDB.

Developed by the founders of DoubleClick, MongoDB formulates implementation of data in certain applications faster, as it stores data in the form of JSON like documents that are coalesced with dynamic schemas. In 2007 10gen began offering MongoDB commercial licenses. As for today a whole lot of enterprises like MTV Networks, Craigslist, Disney Interactive Media Group, The New York Times and Etsy utilize its technology. MongoDB is available under GNU General Public License, with language drivers available under Apache License.

3. OpenStack

Used by: NASA, HP, AT&T, Deustche Telekom

The year 2012 started with analysts and researchers discouraging OpenStack and its qualities. But as time passed, companies started realizing the true potential of this open source project and dozens of organizations started signing in support with the project. It is said that there are over 6000 lines of codes in OpenStack. Despite having to contend with Amazon and CloudStack, OpenStack is firmly entrenched in the cloud market.

OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing project started by Rackspace Cloud and NASA in 2010. Currently more than 150 companies have joined the project among which are AMD, Intel, Canonical, SUSE Linux, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM and Yahoo. The software is licensed under Apache and developed on the Linux operating system.

4. Pentaho

Used by: HP, Red Hat, Cloudera, MySQL, Accenture

Another major player in 2012 was Pentaho. Integrated with Hadoop partners as well as NoSQL companies, Pentaho offers its business analytics solutions under the name, Pentaho Business Analytics. The software is mainly built under Java platform. This year the company had a major uplift with capital rise and in attracting more customers to its business. Some of its major services include data integration, OLAP services, reporting, dashboarding, data mining and ETL capabilities. The company is currently headquartered in Orlando, Florida.

The suite is available across various platforms such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Pentaho offers two types of products-  Pentaho Community Edition (CE) and Pentaho Enterprise Edition which comes under the licenses  Apache version 2.0 and Commercial license respectively.

5. PostgreSQL

Used by: Skype, Reddit, State Farm, Sony online, Instagram

PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS). This open source software is available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. the software is released under PostgreSQL license and is developed by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, consisting of a handful of volunteers employed and supervised by companies such as Red Hat and EnterpriseDB. The software comes with an extensive set of data types, operators, index methods, functions, aggregates, procedural languages, and has a large number of extensions written by third parties.

Off late, PostgreSQL has been getting a lot of attraction, which means that the traditional database space has not exactly dried up. The popularity that came within PostgreSQL also have boosted Enterprise DB a lot who has been selling commercial support and services for PostgreSQL

6. Joomla

Used by: Over 35 million downloads recorded

Next to come on the list is Joomla, which is a free and open source content management system (CMS). The primary use of this software is to publish content on the World Wide Web and intranets such that application frameworks can be used independently. Joomla is also compatible with model-view-controller (MVC).

Joomla is written in PHP and uses object oriented programming techniques and software design patterns for processing. The software has the ability to store data across multiple databases such as MySQL and MS SQL database. Joomla comes with features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization. The product is available across different platforms and is being licensed under GNU General Public License. According to certain studies, Joomla is the second most used CMS on the internet after WordPress.

7. WordPress

Used by: CNN, Forbes, Reuters, Mashable and the New York Times.

Without a doubt, next to follow up Joomla is WordPress. WordPress is also an open source blogging tool and a content management system, which is offered for free. The software is mainly based on PHP and MySQL. WordPress is also the most popular blogging system in use.

According to Alexa rankings, over 16.7 percent of websites across the internet uses WordPress, and by August 2011, the numbers are around 22 percent.

At present, WordPress is known to be the back bone of blogging systems. Earlier WordPress was subjected to a lot of security issues, but as of now, not much of security concerns are being heard from the tech platform. Some of the media companies that use WordPress include CNN, Forbes, Reuters, Mashable and the New York Times.

8. DotNetNuke

Used by: Successfully signed a partnership deal with Microsoft in October 2012

DotNetNuke is a web content management system based on Microsoft .NET. The software primarily is an open source free utility, written in VB.NET. The utility is available under both Community Edition MIT license and commercial proprietary licenses for professional and enterprise editions respectively.

The year 2012 had many ups and downs for the open source firm, as it initially failed to support Microsoft, in their .Net platform strategy. But later that year, DotNetNuke scored gold as Microsoft finally made DNN available on its Azure cloud platform and recently has entered into a partnership to introduce DNN to more of the Microsoft channel.

9. SugarCRM

Used by: Sharepoint, Lotus Notes, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, Gmail

SugarCRM is a free open source customer relationship application (CRM) that comes with features such as sales-force automation, marketing campaigns, customer support, collaboration, Mobile CRM, Social CRM and reporting. The utility is available in both open source and commercial open source application platform.

For a long time, Sugar was considered to be a simple open source provider who was under Salesforce.com. But with sheer hard work and potential, the company has emerged from Salesforce's shadow and become a CRM power in its own right. With lots of ways to consume Sugar, there is a model and price point for just about everyone which definitely is the perfect strategy for their success.