I recently returned from a whirlwind trip to Singapore and China. In China, I spoke at the 2007 Software Innovation Summit – Open Source Software and Trends in Internationalization event organized by Stephen Walli and Anne Stevenson-Yang. Stephen blogged about the event and has posted the slides from the talks. You can get mine here.
I talked about trends we see in Open Source. I identified four trends in the talk:
- Adoption – we’ve written the main apps, now the real challenges lay in convincing users to adopt it. Usability, marketing, and support.
- Freedom Wins – there are crappy business models built around half-hearted adoption of open source. Embrace open source’s strengths, don’t treat it as a weakness.
- Web 2.0 is Open Source – the web is built on open source, and the scaling and platform challenges for Web 2.0 are the challenges for open source.
- Open Beyond Source – the best practices of open source extending to proprietary software development, hardware, and data.
The Open Source Hardware point was particularly timely. Over at Makezine, Phil Torrone observes the 10,000th Arduino board was sold. I first learned of the Arduino early this year at Kiwi Foo Camp when Matt Biddulph, Jon Oxer, and Phil Lindsay hacked a toy car remote control with an Arduino board, Bluetooth, a Mac, and open source. Now Arduino regularly crops up in the del.icio.us bookmarks of my friends, as do other hardware hacking toolkits, and it’s used in our upcoming “Making Things Talk” book by Tom Igoe.
Expect these trends, and others, to be explored at OSCON both in the main sessions and in the Radar Executive Briefing. And, of course, here on Radar.