2015: Open Source Has Won, But It Isn't Finished

At the beginning of a new year, it's traditional to look back over the last 12 months. But as far as this column is concerned, it's easy to summarise what happened then: open source has won. Let's take it from the top:

Supercomputers. Linux is so dominant on the Top 500 Supercomputers lists it is almost embarrassing. The November 2014 figures show that 485 of the top 500 systems were running some form of Linux; Windows runs on just one. Things are even more impressive if you look at the numbers of cores involved. Here, Linux is to be found on 22,851,693 of them, while Windows is on just 30,720; what that means is that not only does Linux dominate, it is particularly strong on the bigger systems...