OStatic

Regional open source conferences are nothing new, but this writer is not currently aware of any that are dedicated to its use in music production. The Open Source City show in Liverpool UK promises to be just that.

The up-and-coming version control system git has begun to prove its mettle outside of Linux kernel development. The Ruby on Rails community has embraced it wholeheartedly with many core projects migrating to the system recently. The climate has become right for businesses to spring up in the wake of this adoption.

Space agencies were some of the first places where you could find open source software in the wild . Being natural early adopters, cash-strapped and very inquisitive, the agencies naturally took to the open source concept. Additionally they were some of the first users of ARPAnet and subsequently the Internet, which lit a fire under the open source movement. Today this marriage between rocket science and open source saw its latest victory with the landing of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander.

While many cloud/utility computing services have sprung up over the past few years, the adoption of their management techniques in the open source world has not. Most people don't need or want to build a large-scale computing cluster in their own business, but they could use some of the automation inherent in these systems to their advantage.