Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.
For the first time we're allowing developers who don't work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That's a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.
Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
Google is committed to open source and open APIs, and part of that is creating a partner-friendly place.
But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now.
I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (e.g., given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone).
I personally think of Linux development as being pretty non-localized, and I work with all the people entirely over e-mail - even if they happen to be working in the Portland area.
All of our code is open source, so it can be used for other projects.
Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.
Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.
The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.
There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.
There are two main methodologies of open source development. There's the Apache model, which is design by committee - great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That's what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.
The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.
I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.
What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.
As Mono matures, people will begin to use it to write desktop components that take advantage of all the hard work thats gone into some of the meatier GNOME libraries, as well as the nifty language features of C#.
We're not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it's possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony.
Let me be clear - Microsoft has no beef with open source.
It's amazing what you can get on open source now if you actually use the right search engines to find the material.
Being open source meant that I could work on the technical side (along with lots of other people), and others who had the interest and inclination could start up companies around it.
What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.
