A talk by Nathan Torkington and Tim O'Reilly on "Trends in the Open Source Marketplace":
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail638.html (audio) http://www.itconversations.com/audio/ITConversations-638.mp3 Tim O'Reilly and Nathan Torkington speak about the O'Reilly radar, which tracks the latest happenings in the tech world. Tim describes O'Reilly media as a company that tries to identify the future and spread the future. Open Source Software (OSS) is changing the way the software industry works. Software is being sold increasingly as a service and software is also getting commoditised. Many OSS companies like MySQL and JBoss have identified an opportunity and want to be the Intel of the new emerging technology by being ubiquitous and providing an essential component of the software stack. Software like GreaseMonkey is changing the way the web is working. These programs are putting the control back in the hands of the end-users. OSS is all about adding collective value and this overriding principle is seen in recommendations systems and wikis. Also Tim observes that the usage of Perl is falling and Python and Ruby are increasing slowly but surely increasing their mindshare. They make some points that tie in with the "mindshare" discussion on this list a few months back. Some quotes of interest: At time index 7:30: Tim O'Reilly: "Ruby on Rails may well be the Perl of Web 2.0." Nathan Torkington: "..why not Perl be the Perl of Web 2.0" Tim O'Reilly: "a good questions we'd love to see answered...a little competition is good for everybody" Statistics on technical book sales showing (time index 17:40): Computer book market has stabilized after 4 years of decline. After a period in which Java books were dropping off, and C# books were rising, Java is bouncing back, but the books selling well now are on open source Java components. Tim O'Reilly: "Perl [books sales are] in a slow, but steady decline... Python...is on a steady rise." Year to year change (time index 20:15): Tim O'Reilly: "Java up 9%...C/C++ up 17%...Perl off 18% since last year." (He suggests the delay in Perl 6 might be a cause. Mentions that O'Reilly has released a bunch of new revisions of Perl books lately and current statistics from the last couple of weeks show sales up 26%.) Statistics on the job market (sourced from Simplyhired.com) (time index 21:30): Tim O'Reilly: "6% of job posting were looking for Perl...16% for Java...4% for C#...only 1% for Python." -Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/e/fps/3452158/ _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
