If you’re a software developer today—or a cloud engineer, or a data scientist, or anyone who works with code—then open source software is like the air that you breathe. But open source wasn’t always so ubiquitous. Twenty or thirty years ago, when “free software” was just getting started, open source projects were unusual, and the people who created them were generally academics, researchers, or eccentrics. Yet somehow this eccentricity caught on, and today open source software is, as the saying goes, eating the world.
Open source software projects have become the engines of innovation in virtually every corner of computing. Yesterday’s open source developers built the tools that built the internet, and today’s open source developers build on, inventing new and better tools for front-end development, back-end development, devops, data ops, distributed data processing, data analytics, machine learning… and much, much more.
We salute the year’s best of these cutting-edge open source projects in our 2022 Bossie Awards.
