ReadWriteHack

Github is now the most popular open source forge, having surpassed Sourceforge, Google Code and Microsoft's CodePlex in total number of commits for the period of January to May 2011, according to data released today by Black Duck Software. This should probably come as no surprise, but it's good to have data to back assumptions.

During the period Black Duck examined, Github had 1,153,059 commits, Sourceforge had 624,989, Google Code and 287,901 and CodePlex had 49,839.

Black Duck also found that C++ and Java were the most popular languages for commits in these forges during this period of time.

We've covered Microsoft Kinect a few times, particularly the release of the hacked open source drivers for the device. Hackers have been building their own projects with it, and Microsoft will be releasing an official SDK for Windows for the product as well. Windows 8 might make use of Kinect and similar features as well.

But even better than open source drivers for the device would be a completely open source alternative. One candidate for this is TLD, aka Predator, an object tracking system that works with normal web cameras on commodity hardware.

Stuck on a Ruby on Rails problem? Call Rails Hotline, a free helpline staffed by volunteer Rails developers, at (877) 817-4190.

Rails Hotline, which was just launched this morning, is powered by Pocket Hotline, a platform designed for companies to crowdsource technical support.

Neo Technology, the sponsor company of the graph database Neo4j, has released the Community Edition of Neo4j under a GNU General Public License (GPL). Previously, it was available under the Affero General Public License.

"That means that in every scenario where you can use MySQL for free, you can now also use Neo4j Community for free," writes Neo Technology co-founder Emil Eifrem on his blog.

Contracts for Java is a new open source tool from Google that makes it easier to implement contracts in Java. According to Google's announcement, this new tool is based on Modern Jass by Johannes Rieken and inspired by the programming language Eiffel. It was created by two Google engineers - David Morgan, Andreas Leitner - using their 20% time, and was expanded as part of an internship by Nhat Minh Le.

Today Foursquare released the code for two applications on GitHub: Rogue, a MongoDB query domain-specific language written in Scala, and Full-Loaded, "a caching image loader for iOS."

Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai announced the projects on Twitter today. More source code from Foursquare can be found here.

Today at CodeMash Microsoft announced a few new resources for ASP.NET developers: ASP.NET MVC3, IIS Express 7.5, NuGet, Orchard 1.0, SQL Server Compact Edition 4, WebMatrix.

Black Duck Software has released its list of the top ten new open source projects from last year: Open Source Rookies of 2010. What were the criteria? According to the company's announcement: "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."

Among them are Diaspora, OpenStack and VoltDB. Do you have a favorite project? Was it listed? Let us know.

A New Zealand company claims to hold the first ever official certification from Microsoft for an open source web application for the Windows platform. SilverStripe, which produces an BSD licensed CMS product, announced yesterday that had achieved the "Certification for Windows Server 2008 R2" from Microsoft. SilverStripe claims its product is the first truly open source, by Open Source Initiative's definition of the term, to have achieved this level of certification. It also claims this is also the first application written in PHP, rather than .NET, to achieve said certification.

Hardware hacker Hector Marcan released his open source Kinect drivers today, winning the $3,000 bounty from Adafruit Industries. Ada Fruit, a New York based company that sells DIY electronics kits, issued the bounty for open source Kinect drivers last Thursday. Marcan's drivers have been tested by other hackers. He says he plans to use the $3,000 to purchase additional tools and devices for Team Twiizers, the hardware hacking group he's a member of. Adafruit is donating an additional $2,000 to the EFF.

Access to Kinect from the desktop opens up some intriguing opportunities. Marshall explored some of ideas about using it to control the Internet of Things and, of course, advertising and interactive retail. But what projects would YOU like to undertake with such a controller?