Please change the title of this to "Important Open Source Projects of 2011" per <a href="http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>. Linkbait titles suck.
<i>OpenStack</i><p>OpenStack might be really important conceptually, and it might have an impressive number of backers, but they really, really need to get something usable in production environments out, and soon.<p>At the moment I think it is hard to justify it being the 5th most important..
Kind of a long way to go to slam Android. :-) (not being snarky per se, but would have preferred the author separate the last bit into a different blog post 'Why Android didn't make the top 10 list'<p>I pretty much agree with most of what is on this list. I might add Asterisk or Gcc. Not sure what I would delete though.
Oye. Let's not start the "X Most Y of 2011" stuff. Every year we are bombarded by these badly written articles. Can we just skip this nonsense this year?
Nothing had an impact in the course of 2011 like Android... now a cheap 100$ phones (often provided to customers for free by phone companies) can do 99% of what an iPhone 4s can do, and this is changing the world.
"So to judge importance, I looked at projects that are influential, <i>gaining in popularity</i>, and/or technical standouts in new areas"<p>So put WebKit on the list. If the growth continues, total usage of WebKit based browsers will surpass 50% by the end of 2012.
What! my favorite open source projet is not in there it sucks!
What! "Most important" does actually means "Most important, in the eyes of the writer".<p>Oh dear.