We’re pleased to announce that the 2015 Open Source Yearbook is now available for download (PDF).

What is the Open Source Yearbook?

The open source label was created back in 1998, not long after I got my start in tech publishing. Fast forward to late 2014, when I was thinking about how much open source technologies, communities, and business models have changed since 1998. I realized that there was no easy way—like a yearbook—to thumb through tech history to get a feel for open source.

Sure, you can flip through the virtual pages of a Google search and read the “Best of” lists collected by a variety of technical publications and writers, much like you can thumb through newspapers from the 1980s to see the how big we wore our shoulder pads, neon clothing, and hair back then. But neither research method is particularly efficient, nor do they provide snapshots that show diversity within communities and moments of time.

The idea behind the Open Source Yearbook is to collaborate with open source communities to collect a diverse range of stories from the year. We let the writers pick the criteria, which means the yearbook isn’t just full of the fastest, most popular, smartest, or best looking open source solutions. Instead, the yearbook offers a mix of open source solutions and projects, from a range of writers and communities, to offer a well-rounded (albeit incomplete) glimpse at what open source communities and projects looked like in 2015.

We couldn’t have put this yearbook together without contributions from many members of the open source community, including the following writers:

• Alicia Gibb, CEO of Lunchbox Electronics
• Becky Stern, director of wearables at Adafruit
• Ben Cotton, support engineer group leader at Cycle Computing
• Ben Nuttall, education developer advocate for the Raspberry Pi Foundation
• Christine Abernathy, Developer Advocate on the Open Source team at Facebook
• Cindy Pallares-Quezada, an Outreachy alumni
• David Both, Linux expert and enthusiast
• Drishtie Patel, GIS Analyst and Missing Maps Project Coordinator at the American Red Cross
• Harris Kenny, VP of Marketing at Aleph Objects
• Italo Vignoli, founding member of The Document Foundation
• Jeff Triplett, Frank Wiles, and Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Django contributors
• Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, co-founder of Bitergia
• John Esposito, Editor-in-Chief at DZone
• Jos Poortvliet, ownCloud community manager
• Mano Marks, director of developer relations at Docker, Inc.
• Michael E. Meyers, the VP of Developer Relations at Acquia
• Robin Muilwijk, Internet and e-government advisor
• Seth Kenlon, independent multimedia artist, free culture advocate, and UNIX geek

As well as Heather Fox (Addison-Wesley Professional), Louise Corrigan (Apress), Ann Morrow (No Starch), Susan Conant (O’Reilly Media), Sarah Hennah (Packt Publishing), and Chantal Kowalski Wiley, who helped compile our list of 29 open source books for 2015.

Download your copy today!

If you’re interested in contributing to the 2016 Open Source Yearbook, email us or submit your story idea: https://opensource.com/story