The fervor over Google's new web-oriented operating system is surprising, even for ardent Linux supporters. After all, it's only been a couple of weeks since Chrome OS was open sourced and after personally test-driving it on a virtual machine, I can tell you that while very interesting, this is still a very young system.

Open source went mainstream long ago. It's a pity, then, that it's still so poorly understood by many of its most ardent admirers.

Firefox was the most widely-used browser among early tech adopters in Q2, followed by Google's Chrome browser, according to software discovery engine Wakoopa. The report, which looks at the emerging trends in desktop software and web applications, found that 55% of early adopters favour Firefox.

Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel, and failure to get encryption running are taking their toll, as early adopters turn to the web for answers and log fresh bug reports in Ubuntu forums.

Anyone following the open source phenomenon can’t help but be amazed at what appears to be volunteerism on a massive scale for corporate gain. Almost every company in the world has some strands of open source code floating around their company.

Linux and other open source applications are finding increasing acceptance in the global marketplace in small and large companies alike. Statistics on the growth of a few open source programs—like Apache, a web server; Linux, an operating system; FreeBSD, an operating system; and PostgreSQL, a database server—show this to be true.

Like several economies in the region, open source adoption in the Philippines is gradually expanding as organizations to seek alternatives to expensive proprietary software. But, unlike some markets, early adopters in the country come from the private sector.

The desktop is uncharted territory. Over the past year, I’ve been on a quest to find an operating system that balances ease of use, stability, low cost and high functionality...I think I can say when the open-source desktop will become a more widely deployed end-user operating system: when it becomes a product and not a project.

When Astaro's founders launched the company in 2000, venture capital funding for open source businesses was hard to find. CEO Jan Hichert says he and his colleagues tried but failed to secure funding and had to bootstrap. After the company was proved successful, VCs proved more willing to contribute to a company built on open source.