What an outstanding year for open source and the Opensource.com community! We shared more than 800 stories on how the open source way is changing our world and pushing innovation to new limits. While there were a number of hot topics, the most noise seemed to gravitate around OpenStack, open hardware, and Linux containers, specifically Docker.

The Opensource.com staff, in partnership with our Community Moderators and members of various open source communities, collected inspiring stories, conducted interveiws, highlighted new projects, and discovered how the open source philosophy is making the world a better place. I would like to thank everyone who has contributed and shared this year. It's been a record year for Opensource.com. A record year for open source. A year of growth, learning, and discovery.

Several milestones from 2014 stand out for me:

Other projects I'm proud of this year are our themed series on anything from open source hardware to open source for beginners and open source in education. What started as an idea evolved into a major component of our coverage this year; and, every month we presented a new theme to our readers. Other themed series favorites include youth in open source, open science, and women in open source. Another project we initiated this year that has helped us provide open source coverage to our readers is our mailing list, the Writer's List, that consists of our writers and serves to alert them to new writing opportunities with us; from interviews to conference coverage to what's next up in our themed series.

And now, the top 20 posts from Opensource.com in 2014...

Top 20 open source stories in 2014

Interesting 2014 stats

More than 4,600,000 page views (last year 2,100,000 page views)

More than 2,600,000 unique visits (last year 1,000,000 unique visits)

More than 3,000 new registered users

More than 2,000 comments

Almost 850 new posts

Almost 200 new contributors

More than 6,000 new Twitter followers

More than 90,000 new Facebook fans

More than 1,200 new Google+ followers

Tell us what your favorite part of 2014 for open source has been in the comments below.