For more than a decade, InfoWorld has been celebrating the most interesting and innovative open source projects with our annual Best of Open Source Awards, aka the InfoWorld Bossies. Back when we started these awards, open source projects were typically small and (with noteable exceptions like Linux or BIND) only marginally important to enterprise developers and IT. But they were useful tools, and they were free.

Today, the most important software—for software development, for cloud computing, for analytics, for machine learning, and for pretty much everything else—is open source software. Open source software projects—sometimes backed by multiple, even competing, deep-pocketed technology companies—are solving the biggest problems in enterprise computing, and reinventing enterprise infrastructure and applications.

Welcome to the 2019 InfoWorld Bossie Awards. In this year’s winners, you’ll find not just the best open source software, but the best software, that the world has the offer.

— Doug Dineley