Best Of The Best: Bossie Awards For Open-Source Software

Movies have the Oscars, stage has the Tonys, sports gets the ESPYs… there’s even an award show for television commercials called the Clios, and that’s some funny stuff right there. But software fans, never fear! Grab your couture and walk the red carpet in honor of the Bossies!

What, pray tell, are the Bossies? They’re InfoWorld’s comprehensive annual awards for the best open-source software. And according to this article, the work of sifting through the available content and finding the best in each category is not easy. So first of all, thanks InfoWorld, for doing the legwork for us consumers. (You get your very own Bossie just for establishing and upkeeping the Bossies!)

Think about the app stores or your favorite locations to browse and download open-source software, then think about exactly how much content there is on those sites. Then imagine trying every one of them out, going back to the original code and seeing what they’re made of, and whatever other criteria are used to select the top programs and applications each year. Imagine following every news lead or scouring every developer event for the most innovative creations, and then you’ll begin to understand a little bit about the Bossie selection process.

“Where do we find all of these winners? We hang out in the places that open source gathers. We take in the conferences, we hit the meetups, we climb the mountains of open source known as GitHub and Sourceforge,” said InfoWorld’s Doug Dineley in an article announcing the winners.

So who were some of the Bossie elite? In Best Applications, Odoo and Mautic were just a couple of the top picks for their capabilities to help companies of every size manage key functions, while Docker and RancherOS were two of the dozen-plus titles selected in the Best Open Source Data Center and Cloud Software categories. For the complete list of InfoWorld’s top picks in each category, click HERE; to see some titles that have an update launching today–like Glary Utilities, FileZilla, and Bandicam–go to FileHippo by clicking HERE.