2007 has been an exemplary year for software freedom, which makes the keynote speakers selected for Ohio LinuxFest 2007 particularly fitting. The Ohio LinuxFest organizers are proud to announce that Max Spevack and Bradley Kuhn will be keynoting this year.

Bloggers took a moment to contemplate the upcoming year and what it means for open source software and Linux in particular. There were some New Year's resolutions and a few holiday gifts still floating around in the week between Christmas and New Year's

“I believe last year was actually the peak year of open source fundraising… This year is down slightly, but not down in such a dramatic way to indicate anything else but a good appetite for funding of open source,” Matrix Partners general manager David Skok told LinuxInsider in late 2007.

It's been a landmark year for open source, and in so many different ways that even a casual survey of the year's events will range far and wide. Here's a quick rundown of what to me were the top five open source events of the year.

2007 is shaping up to be a banner year for open source companies. SourceForge, which hosts almost 160,000 projects, just posted fiscal year 2007 revenues that showed a hefty 35 percent increase over 2006. Red Hat posted a 28 percent revenue increase on the year. And Novell's Suse is valued at approximately $210 million.

More good news for the open source community just in: an analysis of its enterprise customers by OpenLogic found that for 2007 as a whole, the use of open source among enterprise customers is up 26% year-on-year. Enterprises on average used a whopping 94 different open source packages last year, compared to 75 in 2006…

I stumbled across this article in the International Herald Tribune today and was shocked by how off such an otherwise reputable publication could be. The general tone of the article was that open source is struggling to grow. I'm not sure how 100 percent year-over-year growth for the prominent commercial open-source start-ups connotes "struggling," but....

"...this is the second Paris on Rails conference, and last year's was a tremendous success. Expect another year of great presentations from leading Ruby on Rails developers. It all takes place December 10th at the Grand auditorium de la Cité des Sciences, Paris La Villette..."

There are number of factors coming together that lead me to believe that open source's moment is right now, today, this year.