OSCON2006: Tim O’Reilly Keynote – Open Source Trends

New trends:
Ruby books are now outselling Python and Perl books. But JavaScript books have increased the most and are outselling all of the other dynamic languages. Why? Tim thinks it is driven by interest in Ajax, which is the hottest thing right now. Time to get over my JavaScript hatred. IntelliJ helps with that a lot. (Also interesting that Rhino is bundled in JDK 1.6)
The other thing new on the horizon is Django. Tim pointed out that both Rails and django grew out of closed source projects: Rails from 37 Signals, and django from Lawrence Journal World. django is Python’s answer to Rails, so it will be an interesting one to watch.
Virtualization is a big new trend.
Another one is that being on someone’s platform increasingly means you will also be hosted on their infrastructure.
Open Data. Owning your own data and being able to take it with you.
Firefox is the equivalent in the browser world. (Tim did not say this but someone said something yesterday about Eclipse being the new Emacs).
Asterisk and open VoIP is a big deal.
Ubuntu is on the rise. It has huge interest relative to RedHat.

By Greg Luck

As Terracotta’s CTO, Greg (@gregrluck) is entrusted with understanding market and technology forces and the business drivers that impact Terracotta’s product innovation and customer success. He helps shape company and technology strategy and designs many of the features in Terracotta’s products. Greg came to Terracotta on the acquisition of the popular caching project Ehcache which he founded in 2003. Prior to joining Terracotta, Greg served as Chief Architect at Australian online travel giant Wotif.com. He also served as a lead consultant for ThoughtWorks on accounts in the United States and Australia, was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts and spent seven years as a Chartered Accountant in KPMG’s small business and insolvency divisions. He is a regular speaker at conferences and contributor of articles to the technical press.