Every week, I tally the numbers and listen to the buzz to bring you the best of last week's open source news and stories on Opensource.com, this week October 6 - 10, 2014.

Top 5 articles of the week

#5. Moodle will always be an open source project

Samatha Gartner of Moodle, Inc. shares an update on what the open education platform has been up to lately. Some important dates to know:

In 2001, Moodle was launched as an online solution for educators to freely adopt as a tool to reach and engage students in the learning experience within their own websites.

Contrary to some reports, Blackboard did not buy Moodle. In 2012, Blackboard purchased two of the Moodle Partner companies (out of 60) as part of their strategy to diversify their support for various educational technologies.

Today, Moodle will stay an open source project (licensed under GPLv3), and will continue to follow its core open education philosophy.

#4. Elasticsearch director tells us how the magic happens

Robin Muilwijk interviews Leslie Hawthorn, a well known figure in open source and Director of Developer Relations at Elasticsearch, the company behind the open source ELK stack. Chances are you've heard or attended one of her talks. A few for you to look up and listen to from this article are:

#3. What Network Function Virtualization means for OpenStack and open source

Mark McLoughlin is a consulting engineer at Red Hat and has spent over a decade contributing to and leading open source projects like GNOME, Fedora, KVM, qemu, libvirt, oVirt and, of course, OpenStack. In this article, Mark writes for Opensource.com for the first time about a topic of great interest in the OpenStack developer community. The simmering debate is: what exactly does NFV (Network Function Virtualization) have to do with OpenStack, and is it a good thing?

#2. The right fit? 4 open source projects evaluated

Matt Micene continues on his journey to find the right open source project. You can check out his first article to see his guide for casting a wide net for projects and how to evaluate yourself. This article looks at his past track record with a few open source projects and his evaluation of those experiences, then his final picks and an evaluation of which might the best fit. I'll leave it to the article to tell you which one he chooses!

#1. Five talented women in open source you should know

Adam Levenson spotlights five talented women in open source in tandem with the Grace Hopper Celebration 2014 this week, the largest conference for women in computing.

Carol Smith, Open Source Programs Manager at Google

Jennifer Pahlka, executive director of Code for America

Katrina Owen, founder of Exercism

Danese Cooper, head of open source at PayPal

Leah Silber, core team member of Ember.js and cofounder of Tilde, Inc.

From Wikipedia:

Grace Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and invented the first compiler for a computer programming language. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches (inspired by an actual moth removed from the computer). Owing to the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace". The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) is named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC.

Watch the top picks video every Friday before the article goes live! Subscribe to the Opensource.com channel on YouTube to get the latest every week.