One of the big journalistic trends of 2008 was to call every new Internet paradigm open source. Blogging was open source journalism. Social networks were open source crowdsourcing. This was both a compliment and a warning.

Quite often businesses view alternatives if products or services offer better Return on Investment. Open Source is one such option that is often debated in terms of better returns, lower operational costs and of course minimum breakeven time depending on the size of your organization etc.

Of the formative figures in open source, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond loom large. Arguably, however, few have had as much of a disruptive force as Tim O'Reilly, who has helped to create the open-source market and has spent the last six years reshaping it with his seminal "Open Source Paradigm Shift" and other articles.

In the past year, open source software and development models have come to the forefront of mobile computing. Whether its Google's Android, the Asus Eee PC with its Linux underpinnings and UI, or even the comparison of the more open development models of Maemo and Nokia's Internet Tablets with that of Apple's iPhone OSX implementation.

It may be time to turn out the lights on the LAMP stack. Four years ago, LAMP (Linux OS, Apache Web server, MySQL database and Perl, Python and PHP languages) was the open stack of choice, especially for Web servers.

It's time to embrace change in the IT world. Linux, for many, is ushering in a new age of reason. Its cost, stability, and open licensing make it a clear choice for those wanting to save money or shore up their service offerings.

Red Hat can't match Microsoft or Oracle's marketing budgets, but the open source paradigm gives it an advantage in the long term, chief executive Jim Whitehurst told eWEEK Europe.

Some time ago I wrote an article about Jim Kent, an American biologist who used free and open software to race Craig Ventnor to the finishing line, sequencing the human genome. That was very big, cutting edge science with a global audience and reach. We live in an age when big science is done, overwhelmingly, in big businesses, universities, research labs and government laboratories.

On February 9, 1998, I published the Open Source Definition and the public announcement of the Open Source Initiative that Eric Raymond and I were starting. This was the first time that the general public heard what Open Source was about. Friday, February 8 is the last day of Decade Zero of Open Source. Saturday, February 9 is the anniversary of Open Source and the start of Decade One. It's a computer scientist thing. We always start counting from zero :-)