Pity the proprietary software industry. It seems like every time a new open source development company sprouts up, the software world gasps over the new kid on the block who has so many neat toys and cool ideas. When will we gush over the accomplishments of the old guard?

A recent piece by IDG News writer Joab Jackson highlights what the author feels are the top five open source technologies for 2012. Jackson notes that Raleigh, North Carolina’s Red Hat is expected to make a billion bucks in revenue next year, and he quotes Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst who says, unsurprisingly, that innovation is shifting from large software companies to the new open source models.

It’s a great read for anyone who wants to keep abreast with today’s leading open source developments. Among the top guns Jackson singles out: The web server Nginx; the OpenStack cloud outfit; the Stig non-relational, distributed graph database; the Linux Mint computer operating system; and Gluster, which specializes in public and private cloud storage.

I’m particularly interested in Stig, which could potentially be huge for the countless websites managing tons of social networking data.

From the article: Stig is designed for the unique workloads of social networking sites, its maintainers claim. It was created at the social networking site Tagged by software engineer Jason Lucas, who calls the technology a distributed graph database. It is designed to support heavily interactive and social Web applications. The data store's architecture allows for inferential searching, allowing users and applications to look for connections between disparate pieces of information. Because it was written, in part, in the Haskell functional programming language, it can easily divide up its workload across multiple servers.

Stig is still a bit of a mystery, as it hasn't been actually released yet. But observers are predicting it could fit a niche in the social networks and other applications that keep a wide range of data. The needs of social networking services are inherently different from other types of jobs, and would benefit from a database attuned to its needs, Lucas explained. "You can't be a relevant service in this space without being able to scale to a planetary size," he said.