Open Source has come of age. No longer does OS fame rely solely on systems software such as Linux, Apache and the BSD Brigade (See BSD Brigade, September 2000). In the last year, Star Office and Open Office have assulted the Microsoft throne of office suites. In the database arena, MySQL, PostgreSQL and several others have proved themselves capable of enterprise level size and performance.
All of these software packages are necessary for independence from Microsoft, but they are not sufficient for full operation of a business, even a small home business. What has been missing are essential tools for security, backup, and business processing. Today, I can comfortably state that open source covers the first two of those needs and the third, business processing, is well under way.
Science has seen major benefits from the increased capability to manipulate numbers rapidly by the computer. At first this was simply used to take measurements from experiments and determine their statistical significance. Over time, this number manipulation became intensive number crunching, from generating graphs to directly comparing measurements to expected answers.
Later, computers were connected directly to measuring devices to speed up the whole process of capturing measurements accurately and automate the reduction of measurement to numerical equations or graphs.