This is the classic age-old battle of FSF+GNU decentralized vs. MSFT+APPL centralized platform locking strategy in general. Here you see Canonical’s Ubuntu cutting into marketshare of both Windows and OSX http://bit.ly/im7xi0

Cloud computing is definitely going to be the future for private sector. Clasically however, I expect big government to remain firmly rooted in the past except for black budget project cooperatives with Intel+IBM+GM.

In recognition of this fact, I propose a new international annual holiday where we all say thanks to AWS, Akamai, Heroku, and the millions of independent heros burning the midnight oil to dismantle those who seek to imprison information rather than keeping it free.

Thank you Google, Canonical, FSF, GNU, and … ok maybe Apple, sometimes.

To give you a brief overview of the timeline so far: In July, Magento was awarded “Best New Open Source Project” by the 2008 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. In August, Magento was awarded “Best of Open Source Enterprise Applications” by the 2008 InfoWorld.com BOSSIE Awards. This year Forrester Research, the leading technology and market research firm, named Magento as an “Emerging Player To Watch” in its Forrester Wave™: B2C eCommerce Platforms Report, Q1 2009. The growth has just been incredible! Check out the blog for a full in-depth history.

Personally, I have been using this platform for a little over 4 months now (running version 1.2.1 as of this writing) and can’t say enough good things about it. The feature-set is truly an amazing combination of technology. If I had one complaint, I wish there were more documentation, and more extensions, but it’s still pretty early for all that and I know the community is actively working on this with the wiki, screencasts, phpdocs, etc. If there is ever anything you can’t find there, I have always found supportive folks in the #magento chatroom on irc.freenode.net.

Check out their store demo and in the meantime stay tuned for updates, Q&A, tips, tricks, and hacks as I continue benefiting from and contributing back to the platform.