Forrester: open source project explosion driving a "golden era" in app development

An explosion in the number of open source technologies and projects is driving the new paradigm of application development in the mobile, cloud and big data era. Of course, one would have to live under a rock not to notice the huge "app" industry around smartphones and tablets.

But Android is not the only open source game in town driving the innovation. jQuery, Phonegap, Hadoop, Sencha , Apache Cordova, dojo, Ehcache, Riak, Munin and OpenStack are among the many key open source technologies driving the new wave of innovation across the consumer space and enterprise markets, according to Forrester Research.

In a webcast with Black Duck Software today, Forreser Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond said that five out of six developers are currently using or have used open source software tools and frameworks as part of their projects...In the last two years alone, the number of open source projects has exploded to roughly  725,000 in 2012, with 10,000 new open source projects in 2011 alone, and up sharply from 100,000 projects reported in 2006...