This year saw the announcement of , and it also saw the debut of an open source driver for AMD's Ontario Fusion chip. As Linux becomes increasingly mainstream, this is a trend that will continue. No manufacturer wants to exclude an increasingly significant market.

6. ARM

With in the next 18 months, the low-power, open source-friendly ARM architecture will continue to shine. Microsoft and Intel may both now be trying to catch up in this arena, but such efforts promise to be too little, too late.

I predict that ARM chips will become commonplace in PCs and even servers as well, particularly given the growing popularity of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions, which don't require the expensive horsepower that Windows does.

7. Oracle and OpenOffice.org