Linux Magazine’s Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2008
Who knows what the future will hold? Well, heaven knows we don’t or we’d have already won the lottery a few times and retired to a private island somewhere. However, we can look at the past to make a few reasonable predictions– such as the companies in the free and open source software community that are going to have a major impact on the market in 2008.
You might be wondering what the bleep Amazon is doing on a list of companies that will be making the news as an open source player. Sure, it’s a major consumer of FOSS, but what is the company that tried to patent” One-Click” shopping doing here?
Despite its ugly patent policies, the company is offering some interesting technologies, like its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) that seem likely to catch on in a big way in 2008. We’re also interested in the newly inked deal between Amazon and Red Hat to offer RHEL as part of EC2.
We’re watching Amazon not because the company is releasing open source products, but because the company is using Linux and open source technologies to offer real grid computing services that are actually being adopted. Expect to see greater adoption of Amazon’s services in 2008, as well as a horde of imitators.
Amazon’s size, however, will make it difficult for smaller companies to offer the same kinds of uptime and reliability as the shopping giant. The company is also entering the device market with Linux, via its Linux-based Kindle eBook, which is another mark in the” Linux will own the mobile device market” box.
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