Signs of strength in open source

Despite everything its opponents say or do, despite even the occasional ineffectuality of its supporters, open source continues to move forward. (That's an iced tea glass, from Jason Shellen.)

Every day's news brings more evidence:

• The National Computing Center in the UK has opened a lab for the testing and validation of open source products.
• eBay has joined other companies, like Google, in opening up its operations to outsiders using open source code.
• The Open Source 3D Project now offers free, open source 3D models to anyone who registers. Zygote, e Frontier and Sixus1 Media are the founders.
• Startups are using open source practices to get a toehold in content management against giant rivals.

This is not an exhaustive list. All these stories are fairly fresh at the time I'm writing about them.

The point is that we who report on the open source world, as well as those of you who live in it, have a natural impatience. We see the glass as half-empty all the time. But it's also half-full.

In fact I'd say it's much more than half-full.