Top Five Open Source Events of 2005

BusinessWeek Onlinehas rated all open source events of this past year, and narrowed them down to the five most important:

1. Red Hat makes money from free software.

2. In late November, Sun Microsystems makes everything open source, with the exception of Java – the one thing that critics says all developers want.

3. Motorola, the second-largest handset maker in the world, chooses Linux as the standard operating system most of their phones.

4. In October, just short of a year after its mainstream introduction, Firefox had its 100 millionth download.

5. Venture capitalists get into open source. There were about $400 million worth of investments in open source startups in 2005. Most were application companies, the others were services companies.

What will happen with open source in 2006? Many feel that it will continue to flourish, but others think that open source developers will start looking to capitalize on the free sharing.

–Margaret Locher