A few examples of open source excellence

The last few years in linux and FLOSS have been very exciting. Currently there are technologies in development that will blow away most competition purely based on price, or more accurately value for money.

In the desktop arena;

Xgl, Aiglx and Compiz (or metacity), you now have visual effects surpassing apple by far but these aren't just pretty graphics they are productivity marvels. http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-7587965514994593432&q=Xgl

Evolution now has instant searching through beagle desktop search, in fact search is the word of the day. Beagle is faster than spotlight, as I use both heres my round up of the competitive edge in speed, I have a home folder in Linux of around 2-3Gb, in OSX on my laptop is probably about 100Mb, Spotlight from apple will take about 2-3 seconds to populate its top hitters, beagle takes about 0.5 seconds if that! This is incredible in your email client, it takes absolutely no time to find something obscure from 3 years back.

Tomboy, note taking on steroids...

I could go on. banshee, f-spot, inkscape, gaim2 ...

In the server arena we've got growing competition between open source projects, we're not just a one song band anymore, with bedework (caldav), FDS/openLDAP and Hula server for your mail and calendaring and the old favourites and new rivals apache/tomcat, cheetah, cheerypy... things are moving forward, not as fast as any of us would like but its really starting to shift quickly. We've also got the arrival of open source java a few (double digit?) months down the line. This won't boost IBM/Microsoft but will boost the purely open source market.

Eclipse is starting to shift focus from visual studio, and monodevelop is growing up too. With eclipse allowing a developer to rapidly develop software with some cutting edge tools (codegen for example) and port that code onto multiple platforms in no time at all the cathedral is starting to crumble, in response we see much better integration of IBM/Oracle and various other corporate and enterprise products into what is essentially a give away package.

The old addage you get what you pay for isn't quite true anymore, lots of corporate giants are giving away intellectual property to open projects and donating time and resources into what will become a market leader. Community integration has one major advantage over the cathedral model, everyone has a say and everyone is listened to, when was the last time someone could tell microsoft how unusable a product was and get a response from them...

K,