I had the pleasure to talk to Amanda McPherson, one of the minds behind LinuxCon, "LinuxCon is a new annual technical conference that will provide an unmatched collaboration and education space for all matters Linux". Where and where: September 21 - 23 2009, Portland.

Amanda is the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world, protecting more than half a million servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Amanda allows system administrators to set up a centralized backup server to back up multiple hosts to a tape- or disk-based storage system.

As we begin to close the books on 2008 and look into the proverbial crystal ball for open source in the new year, I thought the Linux Foundation was a logical place to start. So I asked LF Marketing and Developer Programs VP Amanda McPherson what her top five open source predictions would be.

Microsoft Windows remains the dominant desktop operating system with approximately 90% of the client operating system market. If Microsoft's monopoly is ever going to be challenged by Linux, there has to be an easy way for Windows' users to be able to learn about this rival operating system.

Now this is good tech news in its purest form: After eight years of development, a new operating system called Haiku has been released in alpha form. It’s an open-source reconstruction of BeOS, the mean, lean, multimedia-savvy OS which I really liked when I reviewed it for PC World, um, eleven years ago.

Back in 2008 there was the announcement from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Texas that VIA had joined the open-source driver bandwagon after having abandoned previous open-source attempts. However, for the past two years, this has largely been a media bluff.

At the Linux Collaboration Summit, Microsoft platform strategist Sam Ramji faced some tough questions during a panel about operating systems. He argued that Microsoft doesn't oppose open source software and that collaboration with the open source software community represents an opportunity for Microsoft.

Last month, the open source community was buzzing over a report released by the Linux Foundation that placed the value of the Linux ecosystem at around $25 billion.

Microsoft is usually very good at presenting new products years ahead of the actual launch - but there continues to be a very remarkable absence of a single strategy for support of Windows applications or Windows as a well integrated desktop.