The wind beneath the wings of open source is reaching hurricane velocities. A swirl of consumer and business needs, data and rich media are creating a vortex that will be impossible for any of us to ignore by year’s end. All indicators suggest that open source is poised to take flight with broader wings this coming year. Here are some exciting trends you may want to track. These trends all relate to unprecedented growth in information and in the way we process it in our expanding digital world.

Applications Galore

In 2006, applications were still chasing their markets. But in 2007, markets will be looking for open source applications. A strong indicator of this trend is the enthusiasm shown by venture capital to invest heavily in a broad range of open source businesses. MySQL is a great example. The company just completed raising $18.5 million dollars in Series C funding and the database market seems now to be clamoring for MySQL’s solutions and services.

OSS is no longer growing just vertically but in every direction possible.

As Linux becomes a commodity platform, the business value is moving upstream into the application stack. Vertical applications such as SugarCRM, Alfresco and Plone along with their support services will make a sizable impact in the enterprise space this year. Furthermore, open source applications are no longer growing just vertically but in every direction. For example, Asterisk in 2007 will continue to transform the horizontal infrastructure of the telephony world and JBoss will broadly challenge the entire middleware market.

Data Everywhere

If you think you did not have a data problem in 2006, you will begin to really feel it in 2007. Documents, music, movies, photos, maps, email will increase exponentially with ever higher resolution and an ever greater variety of sources. TMI (too much information) will force new strategies for data storage and management. Open source is rising to the challenge, providing more integrated and innovative solutions such as the Parakey web operating system and the Flock media sharing and social networking browser.

Rich Media All Over

Remember those black and white TVs when you were a kid. We’ve moved from boring 2D black and white images to multi-dimensional color realism. Look out for even greater realism in the open source world through snazzy compositing engines like Compiz and Beryl on your Linux desktop.

2006 witnessed Google’s $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube which validated the potential for Video on the Net (VoN). Google and Yahoo will be offering more “software-as-services” similar to Google Maps, Docs and Spreadsheets, Yahoo’s Flickr and Del.icio.us. Multimedia social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook will continue to capture more eyeballs. Apple’s iTV service following in the footsteps of iPods and iTunes will spark creation of open source clones and complementary open source software projects.

Growth is unstoppable

As 2007 plays out, the network effects of exponential digital growth will impact open source applications, data and media. We may even see the reversal of roles between open source and its market. By year end, both consumer and enterprise IT markets could be chasing the open source hurricane for its unique ability to produce innovative solutions at Internet speed.

Happy New Year OSS!

Online virtual avatars residing in new digital worlds, like in the popular Second Life Web-based social immersion game, are changing and perhaps even enriching the reality of the lives we live everyday. Eventually experiments in the virtual world could yield important lessons for the real world, for example, in testing out new ideas in e-government. Even the communities behind open knowledge and open source software are evolving in the ordinary plane of reality while at the same time in a cyberspace of their own creation.

As net access and digital realism evolve non-stop, reality is being supplemented by a parallel universe created by many of the most dynamic actors in the open source and open knowledge communities. Even Ubuntu’s leader, Mark Shuttleworth, finds this new twist in social interaction intriguing and challenging, especially in the cross-over between the virtual and reality sides of the “looking glass.” A particularly interesting example emerged recently when the mantle of leadership of the Creative Commons was handed over, during the 4th anniversary global celebrations of the organization, both in the real world and in cyberspace. New chairperson Joi Ito writes on his blog: “Yesterday Creative Commons celebrated its fourth birthday with parties around the world as well as in Second Life. Larry [Lessig] was in Portugal and I was in Japan so we hooked up with the party in Second Life. Board members Hal [Abelson] and Jimmy [Wales] also joined us there together with a great mix of SL visitors and regulars. In Second Life, Larry took the opportunity to pass me a digital torch as part of a ritual where he handed on the Chairman position to me after four amazing years as the founder-Chairman of Creative Commons.”

“Open source leaders are using open source to evolve themselves in the real world and, as if recursively, in the mirrored virtual worlds of their imagination.”

Once data is multi-channel and ubiquitous and digital interaction becomes multi-dimensional and immediate, new paradigms will inevitably emerge for the conduct of the everyday business of life. New models will map into the idealized versions of old pre-digital models. Complete digital access and integration means everyone can have an audience with the (now virtual) king or, perhaps, executioner, with the guru or charlatan, or with the CEO or janitor.  It’s a kind of Second Life incarnation where v-world supersedes e-world.

When much more powerful versions of virtual reality games like Second Life come online, a compelling application would be to set up a virtual ecosystem with real leaders from government, education and industry. As many constraints as possible could be input into the simulation to reflect the “realities” of the local economy, culture and politics. Then the participants would play the game out with various policy parameters — for example, heavy or light taxation, high or low literacy, different degrees of honesty of public servants or corporate leaders, and various levels of human and other physical resources. The idea would be for the real decision makers to keep careful track of the results and then use the lessons they learn from experimenting in v-government to implement policy and practice in real government. But even more interestingly, the real leaders would be playing out different scenarios with each other in a mutual exploration of give and take that would be both safer, yet potentially more threatening, than real life.

Today online games like Linux-based, Apache-run Second Life are used for entertainment or, at most, as a complement to networks of friends and colleagues in the real world. In the future, however, it may become increasingly difficult for any of us to distinguish between what is virtual and what is real. Like programs that write themselves (see “Quines“), open source leaders are using open source to evolve themselves in the real world and, as if recursively, in the mirrored virtual worlds of their imagination.

What will the open source community imagine next?