Community Notes
THE YEAR WAS 2006
Jon Masters looks at a few of the defining moments of 2006 and rounds up the latest activities from the many different Linux User Groups around the world.
This past year will be noted as one in which even the most traditional software companies who didn’t “get it” – such as Microsoft – satup and finally tried to listen. It was also a year in which the dynamics of the Linux community changed. There was a shift away from the mainstream media and users caring solely about “Linux,” to users becoming more interested in the fundamental concepts behind free and open source software. I know of many Windows users who discovered Firefox, Wikipedia, and Thunderbird in 2006, but who have no interest in making the switch away from their Mac OS X or Windows PC – yet they still do “get it,” and are increasingly getting involved in areas in which the different project communities overlap. In fact, a recently published book, Wikinomics, aims to draw various conclusions from these trends and is on its way toward being a bestselling examination of the power of communities like our own.
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