WALTHAM, USA: From a personally-controlled social network to a mobile application that lets aid workers collect, sort and share information about children in emergency situations, open source software is meeting the needs of today's application developers, according to Black Duck Software, which announced its 2010 open source 'Rookies of the Year' list.

Working from a list of thousands of new projects launched in 2010, Black Duck evaluated a project's popularity using a weighted scoring system that awards points for commit activity within a project, the number of developers involved, and the number of web sites linked to the project. After auditing its findings and normalizing scores, Black Duck determined the top 10 Rookie projects.

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The Black Duck Rookies of the Year for 2010 include:

Diaspora, the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network. 

OpenStack is an open source, open standards cloud computing platform, backed by RackSpace and NASA, for building reliable cloud infrastructure. 

Cloud9IDE, the Integrated Development Environment built on top of Node.JS, aims to bring the best features from other existing IDE's and source code editors such as Eclipse, Netbeans, Textmate, and many others together, bundled as plugins. 

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OpenStack Nova is a cloud computing fabric controller (the main part of an IaaS system). It is written in Python, using the Twisted and Eventlet frameworks, and relies on the standard AMQP messaging protocol. 

NuGet is a free, open source developer-focused package management system for the .NET platform designed to simplify the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development.