The new year is almost upon us, so it's a good time to wrap up the year 2009 and ruminate over the best open source software and hardware this year brought us. So without further ado, let me present my personal "Best of 2009" list in no particular order.

2008 was an eventful, breakthrough year for many open source companies, and 2009 will be even more so, especially in terms of business purchasing patterns, software business model shifts, and enterprise software stack evolution.

Deb Goodkin announced the publication of the annual FreeBSD Foundation’s End-of-Year Newsletter (2009). Highlights include: Letter From the President, End-of-Year Fundraising Update, and New Console Driver.

It´s a long standing joke, but I think two or three years ago people stopped claiming next year will be the year of the Linux desktop. Not sure why that is.

So here we are, entering another year- and no doubt at some point during this year, more than one person will declare it the "year of the Linux desktop". Of course it won't happen and those who consider themselves free software opponents will soon let us know. Some things will never change. That said, is there any reason to suspect it might be different this year?

Every year since 2004 has been touted as the year of the Linux desktop. That year where Linux of some flavor makes huge inroads into the home and work desktop scene. Every year these predictions have fallen short. Now 2008 being the year of the Linux desktop stories are already making the rounds.

Whatever you do, 2009 is looking to be a big year. That no exception when it comes to Linux. Applications and large projects continue to develop and make major releases multiple times per 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

Another annual tradition of ours besides running a Linux Graphics Survey is to provide a "year in review" analysis of the ATI and NVIDIA Linux drivers with their respective graphics driver releases from the past year in terms of both feature improvements and how their quantitative performance has changed.