Every week, I tally the numbers and listen to the buzz to bring you this week's most read articles on Opensource.com. Here's the top 5 for this week: December 15 - 19, 2014.

Top 5 articles of the week

5. National Geographic takes open source to the wilderness

Robin Muilwijk interviews Shah Selbe in this article covering his work as a National Geographic Explorer using open source technolog to chart and measure wildnerness all over the globe. In his interview he goes into more detail about his most recent project, the Okavango Wilderness Project, in Africa. With the the open hardware board, the Raspberry Pi, and FishNET, an open platform, Shah tracks and shares data to improve conservation of our most valuable natural areas.

4. My life in open source, and the mentors who led the way

Rich Bowen has been working on the Apache http server for almost 20 years. He's also written 9 books about httpd and spoken at more than fifty conferences. He's a member of the Apache Software Foundation, where he serves as a board member and as Executive Vice President. Last but not least, he is also responsible for putting on ApacheCon, both in North America and Europe, which is the official conference of the Apache Software Foundation. In this article, Rich tells us ALL of it is due to the people who believed in him and pushed him to achieve more. Learn how you can be a mentor, no what your age or field. Maybe even reach out to and thank one of your mentors today.

3. Best open source tutorials of 2014

Scott Nesbitt delivers one of his fantastic best of lists, with this article our top guides this year on Opensource.com. These tutorials have likely been bookmarked, referenced many times, and maybe even printed out! Scott categorizes the guides into these categories: images and sounds, files and passwords, your inner geek, and beyond technology.

2. GPLv2 goes to court: More decisions from the Versata tarpit

Mark Radcliffe of writes about this ongoing case regarding the GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2). Fun facts: The GPLv2 is the most widely used open source license. Black Duck Software estimates that 16 billion lines of code are licensed under GPLv2.

1. Top 10 open source projects of 2014

Every year our team looks back at the numbers and buzz around the open source projects we've had the pleasure of covering this year. There are so many new and exciting things happening in open source, beyond technology, but particularly in software. Our list consists of the most read and most talked about open source projects—the ones that are making surf-size waves. If one of your favorite projects made the list, we'd love to hear why you love it. You can leave us a message in the comments on the article or on the articles Facebook or G+ post.