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Many new innovations and advancements are developing in the Computer Technology field. The growth is not coming from the expected sources like the larger companies like Microsoft, Sony, IBM or Oracle but from The Open Source community.

This is interesting observation seeing the monitory resources are in the larger companies and Open Source community development is realize on free contributions. It is not to say that the major players are not designing fine products it is just that they are not creating products.

We can all point at Linux and its incredible growth as a prime example but this product was just filling in the immense gaps opened by the Great Dot Com crash. At one point it looked as though Microsoft was on the verge of completely dominating the browser market but Open Source Mozilla and an off-shoot product called FireFox penetrated the market and took over 25%. Microsoft has regained a portion of the lost market share but only by copying innovations from FireFox.

The Database market has been dominated by the big 3 of Oracle, IBM and Microsoft but even that dominance is being threatened by such Open Source products as PostgreSQL and MySQL with its new PBXT and Falcon engines.

In one of the immerging markets created by Microsoft to insure development stability as much as to hold their market share has seen the creation of the .Net Framework On this Framework programming languages work like interpreters on top of a feature rich structure. The design is to allow programmers from every discipline the ability to quickly create applications without having to directly access the base operating system.

A small Open Source product started being developed to create a parallel infra-structure but on the Linux platform. At the offset MONO was given little chance of success, but that assumption was made two years ago and now the product is being totted as 97% completed. Recently an offshoot development team announce they are able to offer a product the will allow all Visual Basic applications to port over to Linux and compile without modifications.

There has been no official comment from Microsoft as of yet, but I am sure there are concerned seeing the VB has the largest programmer development base in the world.

From the Open Source world a host of products have been emerging and are now offering the market a inexpensive alternative. Will these two diametrically opposed development stream end up seriously threatening the current big market players? Time will tell.