I spent the last month taking a break from Open Source, partly due to FreeBSD 7.1 failing to hit the FTP servers as scheduled (any excuse), but mostly due to Santa’s early delivery of Ableton Live. Not really Open Source I may add but extremely cool nonetheless and a much needed break from coding!.

I find that staring too much at code can hamper the creative process (hehe), and as you know Creativity and Innovation go hand in hand with Open Source Software!.

Speaking of which, while I have been busy playing with waveforms and elastic audio, the Open Source world has been all guns blazing with cool releases like MySQL 5.1 GA, Open Solaris 2008.11, VirtualBox 2.1 and WordPress 2.7 to name a few.
You really cannot take a break these days without something big in the world of Open Source happening in your absence.

So the year is nearly at an end which got me thinking, what was the highlight of 2008 in the world of Open Source?.
I have to confess to spending more time than I would have liked this year working with proprietary software, always in combination with Open Source tools of course!. So if I had to highlight anything from 2008 it would be that Open Source is now more pervasive than ever. From your OSX laptop at home to the Linux servers at work, right the way up to the Internet’s biggest sites and services (running FreeBSD ), you’ll find Open Source Software behind every successful venture. In fact it is now so popular even Microsoft could not resist the urge to get in on the game!.

In fact there are so many Companies using Open Source now that proprietary software may actually be the minority! We all know everyone loves an underdog, so maybe propreitary software will be the hit in 2009? Then again with the state of the economy maybe not!

The biggest influence for me this year (both good and bad) had to be Sun Microsystems who played a large part in Open Source adoption in the enterprise and continue to lead the way with their open business model (GlassFish, MySQL, Netbeans, OpenJDK, OpenSolaris and VirtualBox to name just a few of their many contributions).

Although most of the time it seems like they cannot do anything right, one thing is for sure, without the corporate weight of Sun behind the Open Source ethos we may not have made it here so quickly. So while your saving big bucks with your ZFS storage and processing millions of transactions with MySQL, don’t forget to say thank you to Sun next time you are complaining about JavaFX or MySQL 5.1.
You may even want to swap those complaints for contributions (I know complaining is often easier). Thanks Sun!

So if you are one of the few companies yet to Open your code to the world, what are you waiting for? This Christmas give the gift of knowledge and share your achievements instead of fearing the competition and wrapping your code in a black box (don’t worry we won’t laugh at it). You’ll feel much better knowing you helped make the world a better place!

Until next year I wish you all a Very Open Source Christmas!! and as always Happy Coding!