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Best Open Source Software Identified By InfoWorld Listicles (infoworld.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the you-won't-believe-what-happens-next dept.

An anonymous reader writes: InfoWorld announced the winners of this year's "Best of Open Source Software Awards" -- honoring 68 different projects, spread across five categories. Besides the 15 best software development tools, they also recognized the best cloud computing software, machine learning tools, and networking and security software (as well as the best databases and analytics tools).

"Open source software isn't what it used to be," writes Doug Dineley, the site's executive editor. "The term used to conjure images of the lone developer, working into the night and through weekends, banging out line after line of code to scratch a personal itch or realize a personal vision... But as you wend your way through our Bossie winners, you're bound to be struck by the number of projects with heavyweight engineering resources behind them... Elsewhere in the open source landscape, valuable engineering resources come together in a different way -- through the shared interest of commercial software vendors."

More than 10% of the awards went to the Apache Software Foundation -- 7 of the 68 -- though I was surprised to see that five of the best software development tools are languages -- specifically Kotlin, Go, Rust, Clojure, and Typescript. Two more of the best open source software development tools were Microsoft products -- .Net Core and Visual Studio Code. And in the same category was OpenRemote a home automation platform, as well as Ethereum, which "smells and tastes like an open source project that is solving problems and serving developers."

63 comments

  1. I don't see a list of "best" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    All I see is a list of "frameworks we used".

  2. Re:Not relevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Correct, you are not relevant!

  3. Advertisement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Clicked on first link. Saw it was a bullshit slideshow rather than a list. Fail. Don't care enough to put up with that.

  4. So great to see Rust getting some recognition! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The Rust programming language made their list of top dev tools and this is great to see! Rust really deserves this recognition because it is one of the few languages really pushing ahead the state of the art. C and C++ and Java were good for writing the kind of software we've used during the last 50 years, but Rust delivers what we'll need to write software for the next 100 to 200 years. Rust is built from the ground up to handle large software systems running on computers with many CPU cores and in hostile environments like the Internet. It's well positioned to meet our current and future programming needs. The community is also one of the friendliest I've ever dealt with. They know their stuff and they're always willing to help. Rust is the future and getting this recognition is just what it needs for more people to learn about all that it can offer.

    1. Re: So great to see Rust getting some recognition! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And yet its evangelists are all morons. How can that be?

    2. Re: So great to see Rust getting some recognition! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And yet its evangelists are all morons. How can that be?

      Are you a Rust evangelist?

    3. Re: So great to see Rust getting some recognition! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Too bad it's distributed under a contaminated license.

    4. Re: So great to see Rust getting some recognition! by Reverend+Green · · Score: 1

      The big complaint I always here about Rust is the toxic community. They have a reputation for intolerance, bigotry, and dogmatism. Whether that reputation is deserved I cannot say. It's bad enough to make me not really want to explore The Rust ecosystem.

    5. Re: So great to see Rust getting some recognition! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Theo de Raadt, Leonart Pottering, and Leah Rowe use Rust? Who knew!!!

    6. Re:So great to see Rust getting some recognition! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Rust programming language made their list of top dev tools and this is great to see! Rust really deserves this recognition because it is one of the few languages really pushing ahead the state of the art. C and C++ and Java were good for writing the kind of software we've used during the last 50 years, but Rust delivers what we'll need to write software for the next 100 to 200 years. Rust is built from the ground up to handle large software systems running on computers with many CPU cores and in hostile environments like the Internet. It's well positioned to meet our current and future programming needs. The community is also one of the friendliest I've ever dealt with. They know their stuff and they're always willing to help. Rust is the future and getting this recognition is just what it needs for more people to learn about all that it can offer.

      I mod this post +5 funny (if I had mod points).

  5. Re: Not relevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Speaking the truth around here will always trigger the freetards and get you modded down. You are threatening their safe space.

  6. conjuring images by darthsilun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Open source software isn't what it used to be," writes Doug Dineley, the site's executive editor. "The term used to conjure images of the lone developer, working into the night and through weekends, banging out line after line of code to scratch a personal itch or realize a personal vision...

    Pffft. Not sure what planet you were on. I was using gcc-1.33 or so and X11R3 way back in 1989. Both were too big to be done by lone developers and that not withstanding they were clearly the work of many people.

    1. Re:conjuring images by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because they don't make any income from software development, many open source (especially linux) developers are farmers by day in communes and programmers by night. Of course, open source software is a bug fest.

    2. Re:conjuring images by chipschap · · Score: 1

      Of course, open source software is a bug fest.

      And as a corollary, proprietary software (like Windows) would then be practically bug-free?

    3. Re:conjuring images by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because they don't make any income from software development, many open source (especially linux) developers are farmers by day in communes and programmers by night. Of course, open source software is a bug fest.

      Must be the software you write that's full of bugs; no wonder you work in the communes. Me? I'm doing very well. Thanks for asking.

  7. Of course by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 2

    no MySQL or MariaDB in the "best" "databases and analytics tools" ; are they too famous to deserve a mention?

    --
    Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    1. Re:Of course by LifesABeach · · Score: 2

      I was also thinking of Postgre, and MongoDB? Not flashy stuff, but these two can carry the load.

      Eclipse didn't receive any mention, strange. Yet I've encountered few who didn't know how to use it.

      As for Machine Learning? Not a single one was used for learning to interface to people. Maybe some more learning needs to happen there.

    2. Re:Of course by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Postgres.

      The shorter name of PostgreSQL is Postgres.

      I'm fond of Firebird myself. It's practically unknown yet it's miles ahead of MySQL in SQL features...

  8. bah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No love for g++?

    bash?

    grep?

    ssh?

    openvpn?

    I use those things infinitely more than I'm ever going to use 'Rust' or 'Visual Studio Code'.

    1. Re:bah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      It's like they kicked us right in the listicles by omitting our favorite programs.

      ---
      p.s. haha. Slashdot knows what's up. Captcha: naughty

    2. Re:bah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...I'm pretty sure there are better shells out there than bash. Ever tried ksh or zsh?

      I once printed out the full bash man page, but then I learnt that a shorter Bourne shell syntax reference would've been more useful.

  9. Why give attention to little-used languages? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why do these little-used programming languages like Kotlin, Scala, Go, Rust, Clojure and TypeScript get so much attention?

    I can't think of any notable software that's written in Kotlin, Scala or Clojure. Shit, I don't even know why they're in a list for 2017. Scala and Clojure were hyped several years ago, and the hype died out soon afterward. I don't even think Kotlin has ever gotten much hype at all.

    TypeScript basically just makes JavaScript a less-stupid language. It's not like it extends JavaScript in any real way. It just provides some hacks to hide really glaring flaws in JavaScript.

    Rust is a fucking joke, I think. I can only think of two things written in Rust: the Rust implementation and Servo. Having used both, I am not impressed. When I used it, I found the Rust implementation to be slow and bloated. I think that Servo is a total failure, too. Rust code is really awful to read and understand, even for people experienced with a complex language like C++. It's like the community is more obsessed with codes of conduct and social justice than they are with creating a useful language, too.

    Out of all of those languages, at least Go has gotten some use. It's still a shitty language, in my opinion, but at least it's not a total failure like the others that were listed.

    None of these languages deserve even a fraction of the attention and hype that they've been getting. We still see pretty much all important software being written in languages like C++, Java, Python and C. Even C# and PHP are more important than the languages that were chosen as being the "best" in 2017.

    1. Re:Why give attention to little-used languages? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 2

      > Why do these little-used programming languages like Kotlin, Scala, Go, Rust, Clojure and TypeScript get so much attention?

      Perhaps because their survey approach gets responses from young, eager programmers far more than from anyone with a few years of experience, and from those who have completed successful projects. I visit Slashdot for the occasional high interest story, and the occasional opportunity to share insights and experience. But I certainly don't spend my time on market surveys or ranking of software projects.

    2. Re:Why give attention to little-used languages? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think the reason Rust gets so much attention is because of the promise of safety and some additional nice to haves.
      As an embedded systems programmer I look at rust and wish that C had some of those features.
      At the same time, I agree, Rust isn't ready yet, and it's overhyped at the moment.
      The compiler is still slow.
      Lots of features are still missing, under development, or only available in nightly builds.
      The fact that you can't initialize a vector without a macro is also kind of strange.
      Either way, things like traits, real enums that don't decay into an int at the drop of a hat, references guaranteed to not be null, and various other things would all be nice to have imho.
      Even the ownership might be useful, but I find it very cumbersome to write code in it.

    3. Re:Why give attention to little-used languages? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How is Servo a failure ? I'm using part of it in Firefox beta, and it's been long since I found Firefox as fast and usable as today. In fact I ditched Chrome to use FF 57 as my main browser yesterday.

      Replacing C++ with a memory-safer language should be a priority, at least security-wise. Just read any major software's security advisories. If the software is written in C++, memory-related errors will probably be behind most of the vulns.

    4. Re:Why give attention to little-used languages? by Carewolf · · Score: 1

      I think the reason Rust gets so much attention is because of the promise of safety and some additional nice to haves.
      As an embedded systems programmer I look at rust and wish that C had some of those features.

      C++ already do. Everything in Rust is basically a best-practices of C++ programming mid 2010s. It is just inverted, where in C++ the simplest code is the unsafest, and you have to make an extra effort to follow best practices, in Rust those are simplest primitive, and the unsafe primitives are move verbose to use and only there for integration with other code.

      So Rust isn't bad, but it is also kind of pointless if you are already a good c++ programmer.

    5. Re:Why give attention to little-used languages? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think enforcing best practices in the compiler, and making it explicit when and why you are breaking them can be useful.
      Also, I'm not a C++ programmer, so I can't be sure, but doesn't C++ have the same problem with enums that C does?
      Personally, what I really want from rust is C with a couple extra conveniences. Of course that's not really what it is.
      I also don't want C++ with its koenig lookup, rvalue, universal, regular references, and all kinds of other stuff I don't even want to think about.
      So for now I will stick to C.
      Just imagine being able to implement a generic list in C without using void pointers and casting them back to the right type.

    6. Re:Why give attention to little-used languages? by Carewolf · · Score: 1

      I think enforcing best practices in the compiler, and making it explicit when and why you are breaking them can be useful.
      Also, I'm not a C++ programmer, so I can't be sure, but doesn't C++ have the same problem with enums that C does?

      Sometimes, but C++ is actually stronger typed than C, and you can add warning to all type-casts of enums to int. Also in C++ enums won't cast to other enums, only to and from int or whatever there underlying type is.

      As for all the stuff you don't want to learn. You have to learn it for Rust anyway. The efficient safety of the language is build around the same advanced tricks as in C++, so move semantics like rvalue-references, are there, and are in fact even more complicated with temporary ownerships and borrowing.

      You would do better to learn a bit of C++ and just use the parts you like and fully understand to improve your C code. Even just compiling C-code with C++ will give you stronger type safety and better warnings (which is why gcc does that now).

  10. Top of the listicle: systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What the fsck is a listicle? Slashdot editors are the systemd of this site... bring back CowboyNeal.

  11. OpenRemote & The Cloud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is there some sort of peer-peer protocol for home automation that would get us off the cloud habit? Why can't we "phone home" using our own devices for such a simple thing. It could be much more secure; and, of course, everything is under our control, not the current whim of some corporation or organization.

  12. Re: Worst President ever identified by Bob Mueller by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Snowflakes still can't cope with the fact that they lost and they suck, miserable shits. Even stupid cockroaches know when to hide back under rock.

  13. Stopped reading at "slideshow" by Snotnose · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Slideshows need to die, just like the blink tag of myspace needed to die. Slideshow? Close that tab and move on. Oh, you can be deslided? Someone else will do it. Somewhere on the page I can "display full article"? Not gonna look for it.

    Slideshows need to FOAD ASAP.

    1. Re:Stopped reading at "slideshow" by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 2

      Usually when I hit a "1 of 10" page, next click goes to "close tab".

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    2. Re:Stopped reading at "slideshow" by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Usually when I hit a "1 of 10" page, next click goes to "close tab".

      I find ^w to be faster.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:Stopped reading at "slideshow" by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

      I find ^w to be faster.

      Not so sure, if you're still holding the mouse...

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    4. Re:Stopped reading at "slideshow" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In all seriousness, I've fallen for clickbait and other things so many times that when I press "CTRL" to open in a new tab my middle finger instinctively moves to the "W" key.

  14. I Wish ... by Ignoramous-5684 · · Score: 2

    ... that we would be warned when being directed to a slideshow.

  15. Go is not ready for prime time by rrohbeck · · Score: 1

    I re-built a known-to-work project and it failed when I tested the new build (where the program written in Go was maybe one thousandth of the total code size.) A few hours of debugging later I found that the Go developers had made a "breaking" change in the SSL client code a few weeks earlier.

    --
    thegodmovie.com - watch it
    1. Re: Go is not ready for prime time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yup. If you didn't save the old version of a library you can't rebuild a Go project. Which means it's pretty useless.

    2. Re: Go is not ready for prime time by Reverend+Green · · Score: 1

      That's more a tooling/ecosystem problem than a language issue. But frustrating all the same.

      It's a bit surprising that a language with such a gleefully anti-democratic core team hasn't been able to settle on a package management solution yet.

    3. Re:Go is not ready for prime time by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 2

      This is a _very_ common problem for systems that re-invent versioning for their projects, especially when they ignore the very robust GNU numbering scheme. That major.minor.trivial numbering scheme 's described well at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

      It's been a large problem with older tools as well, and it is why industrial operating systems do _not_ upgrade core components to major new releases. It's been devastating to projects that say "just build the code when you need it", because components in the public repositories change incompatibly with other components in the public repositories. Every new modular software suite encounters this problem.

      As an older programmer, I must admit I have no _time_ for the teething pains of extremely exciting new technologies. I'm afraid their extremely high performance or exciting early progress will be lost when they actually have to support sanitizing their input, or correctly handling lexical versus dynamic scoping. The errors are commonplace, and it's very easy to write a snippet of code that tests _really well_ on your local laptop and not actually use it under load or with real data. Building out the test suite is often left out and leads to some very expensive uses of bleeding edge technologies.

  16. Re:Not relevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's funny, I've been making a pretty fair living using nothing -but- FOSS for the last 20 years.

    I just bought a second home on a nice lake in the Southeast US. With money I didn't have to spend on Windows licenses.

  17. Re:Truer words were never spoken... apk by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

    *yawn*

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  18. Re:Truer words were never spoken... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Opening your trap to swallow apk's load here https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11179595&cid=55285591/ ? Yes. You like the taste (hahahaha).

  19. Re:Truer words were never spoken... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ROTFLMAO!

  20. Apple's Core ML is Open Source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    could be? but i can't seem to find the source code. Maybe the Apple SDKs are open source?

  21. Truer words were never spoken... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    See subject: Facts (superior to 'relative' mere 'truths') blow their doors out & the "best they got" vs. them? Bogus "downmodpoints" (which it's easy to exhaust them of easily, simply override posting limits via proxy servers + repost, lol) - you KNOW you've won when "their 'downmod truncheon' is used in lieu of conversation...

    RoTfLmAo - I laugh since I do it ALL DAY LONG to these effete downmodding douches & it makes me laugh! Case in point? See next:

    * ZontarTheMindless: "MORALS ARE FOR MEN - NOT GODS..." quoting Lt. Gary Mitchell from StarTrek TOS "Where NO MAN has gone, before..."

    APK

    P.S.=> On the topic though? I will say there is 1 "OpenSORES" project I am completely impressed by & that's Mr. Torvald's Linux OS (gets a lot of commercial company support though) - I will give credit where it's due (yes, there are others, but imo it's "THE" outstanding example thereof)... apk

  22. Re:Not relevant by hackwrench · · Score: 1

    You still are living in a dream world. They meant it when they said life is but a dream.

  23. The next 100 years... by jopsen · · Score: 1

    Rust has two upsides: safe multi-processing on a shared memory architecture; and safe manual memory management.

    Shared memory architectures probably won't be relevant all that long... Limitations in hardware make cache synchronization hard, and limits the number of cores... Even today having multiple cores using shared memory is super slow. The future of safe multi-processing belongs to message passing, the over head is a bit higher, but the hardware will scale for decades to come.

    As for safe zero-cost abstractions for manual memory management rust certainly has some benefits... But both go, java and .Net are proving that garbage collection isn't super expensive.

    Don't get me wrong, rust the best language right now, and will probably be for another decade or two.. But the mental overhead of abstractions isn't free, so I'm not sure what the long term future will look like, except I know javascript will still run in 200 years :)

  24. Re: Not relevant by Reverend+Green · · Score: 2

    Funny. I stopped using a Mac in college. I stopped using Windows earlier, when I learned there was anything else - at all - available.

  25. Re: Not relevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Speaking the truth" is a fake-progressive euphemism for "licking capitalist boots".

  26. Re:Truer words were never spoken... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh, look. Kowalski took that third-grader's dick out of his mouth long enough to post something mind-boggingly ignorant. Stand by for one of his tsunamis of fuckwittery. Fuck off and die, Kowalski, you drooling idiot.

  27. I'll let a /.er quoted put YOU in YOUR place by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "APK your posts on this and the hosts file posts, and more, have never been in error and/or bad advice" by BlueStrat (756137) on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @08:52PM (#54665383)

    APK

    P.S.=> You really should quit projecting your pedophilia you know... lol! apk

  28. More than 70% of IP traffic is video! by StreamingEagle · · Score: 1

    So where is x264, which encodes most of the video you watch? x264 powers YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Hulu, most cloud video services, and more commercial/broadcast video encoder systems than any other encoder library. Where is x265? FFMPEG? LibAV? Gstreamer? VLC? Open source dominates video and audio processing. As far as image processing... where is GIMP? GEGL? OpenCV?

  29. Re: Impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I was going to ask you how you keep them so minty fresh.

  30. Re: So great to see Rust getting some recognition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Please don't mention Theo in the same sentence as Lennhart. Seriously.

    Theo creates beautiful, secure, easy to read code. I can't say the same about the rest.