Up there in Portland this week, OSCON is taking place. The open source world at large uses this as a venue to talk about software of all kinds, but from the outside it does appear to be growing in popularity in the enterprise. Or, at least, with enterprise companies.

Today, looking back at the history of open source software and looking forward to the future, the enterprise is only going to continue its growth as the place where open source innovation takes place. Apache Hadoop will see to that. In Hadoop, we have an ecosystem of tools that are essentially of no use to anyone outside of business and science. We've had HPC tools for a long time, and open source HPC tools as well. But Hadoop provides a framework that is useful at exactly the right time: when data is exploding.

Linux, which turned 3.0 last week, was similarly placed in history. In 1999, the world needed servers more than anything else. You couldn't spin up new Web servers fast enough. Cobalt made a whole $1 billion business based on the idea of cranking out cheap servers. It was Linux that enabled those servers to come online faster and easier than anywhere else. The dedicated concentration of expertise and genius upon that single platform helped mold Linux into exactly what the world needed at that time and place.

This is mostly just a round-about way to brainstorm for my larger article, but just to make sure ya'll get something out of OSCON even if you can't be there, here are some links to the best stuff at the conference.

The Unicode support shootout (Super awesome. Not to be missed)

Live stream of OSCON going on right now.

The Open Cloud Initiative.

Oracle previews MySQL 5.6

Mozilla is building an operating system.

Metrics, Metrics Everywhere. (Not OSCON, but still awesome.)