I came across OSDL’s Desktop Linux Survey today and was pleased to find Beagle called out among other technologies like Firefox, LTSP, and Mono. The report says, “a major factor in the adoption of Linux on the desktop is the availability of applications,” and lists Beagle as one of “several significant commercial and open source applications [that] were realized for the Linux desktop.”
Also, I neglected to mention a few weeks ago about the European Union’s “Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU.” (PDF). It’s a long document, but there’s a lot of good information in there. One thing that made me pretty proud but that struck me as surprising was seeing Ximian as the 8th highest contributing firm to free and open source software. Novell isn’t in the top 10, but there’s no doubt that the combination of Novell’s previous and subsequent open source efforts, SUSE’s many contributions, and Ximian’s code prior to its acquisition would bump Novell up a notch or two above Ximian’s 8th place.
Speaking of SUSE, the code behind the openSUSE build service was released under the GPL yesterday. I’ve been using it for a little while to build updated Beagle packages for SUSE, and it’s been a great tool to use. Congrats to everyone who made it happen.