OSCON: O’Reilly bullish on open source

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PORTLAND. Tim O’Reilly (you know the guy who runs the big tech publisher) is still bullish on the prospect of open source. After 10 years of running the OSCON conference he still sees innovation on the horizon.

In the AM keynote at OSCON, O’Reilly told the large crowd about some new data that his research firm (O’Reilly Radar) has just released which shows that open source usage still has a aways to go. Among non-technology companies O’Reilly’s research found that 1 in 385 jobs (0.25 percent) use open source in some way. In contrast among technology companies the figure rises to 1 in 55 (1.8 percent).

Linux is the most widely used open source tool according to O’Reilly’s data though Alfresco, Zimbra and Drupal are all rising fast.

“As we look at our success in last 10 yrs we
can be proud,” O’Reilly said. “But what I’m most excited about and
ecourage by is that you’re tackling
new hard problems and not wrestling on your laurels”.

Overall O’Reilly sees the continued need for the freedom of data that open source promises, especially as the world moves to a cloud based compute infrastructure.

“Work on what’s hard and make freedom reign in each new
market so history is not a wave that passes us by but one that carries us to the
future,” O’Reilly said.