Speaking in a keynote address at the Govtech conference in Cape Town this morning, Mark Shuttleworth discussed strategies that government should take on in developing IT locally.

Open source moves at a different speed to commercial software. This has become apparent over the last decade as Linux and its Open Source fellow travelers (Apache, Open Office, MySQL, Firefox et al) gradually established their position in the software world.

I guess a dedicated Microsoftie could spin this in a positive way (rah! rah! 100% growth in DOCX format in three months), but it is getting harder. In eight months since Office 2007 was released to th general public (10 months since release to enterprise customers), there are under 2000 of these office documents posted on the web.

The Fedora Project offered a peek under its kimono recently with details about Fedora 7 adoption and other statistics. Fedora 7 has snagged more than 300,000 users since its release at the end of May. While that sounds pretty good, Fedora Core 6 managed to attract more than 400,000 in roughly the same amount of time after its release.

In a mildly childish attempt at putting the popularity of Ubuntu into real context, I've enlisted the help of Google trends to benchmark searches for "Ubuntu" against other words. Mindless spam or important sociological experiment? You decide.

It can't be easy being Fedora; the once cream of the crop release being entirely overshadowed by the young upstart that is Ubuntu. Times have changed and things have been increasingly hard for Fedora - forever slipping in the Distrowatch popularity chart.

All European countries saw an increase in Firefox participation with Hungary showing the most dramatic increase from 27.2%, in the latest March 2007 survey, to 39.7%. Overall, Europe grew from 24.1% to 27.8%.

I stumbled across this article in the International Herald Tribune today and was shocked by how off such an otherwise reputable publication could be. The general tone of the article was that open source is struggling to grow. I'm not sure how 100 percent year-over-year growth for the prominent commercial open-source start-ups connotes "struggling," but....