Open Source in 2009

2009 has been a very big year for FOSS with a number of high-profile occurrences and products being released this year. Let’s  take a short look at some of these:

  • the release of Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 as well as Red Hat’s KVM-orientated RHEL 5.4
  • the submission of code twice by Microsoft into the open source domain ( both times due to breaches of the GPL license ) – one was for the Microsoft Virtual Server Linux virtualisation drivers and one for the USB Boot tool for Windows 7
  • the back-end of Whitehouse.gov was switched to Drupal CMS
  • the Apache Foundation celebrated 10 years and 300 members working on 65 projects
  • Red Hat was added to Standard and Poor’s 500 stock index
  • cloud computing as a business model was born
  • Linux showed up in Samsung TV’s, Sony cameras, Motorola cellphones and many other products