Power does seem to be the buzz word. It does allow u to have a say in many ways and if u have a strong fan base it only makes things easier. Channels of social media are too under it’s deep influence. Other than the popular voices in the open source world, some recently launched search platforms too have made their presence felt. Solr is one of them . I happened to come across an article containing it’s details at http://www.lucidimagination.com/Downloads/LucidWorks-for-Solr/Reference-Guide

@hoohoo sun is no longer, it's now oracle, just a reminder, you don't want to lose touch like some modern journalist :)

Thanks for correcting my ignorance wrt userland. I've not used *BSD so much, I was mistaken.

"*BSD/Linux use GNU for all the user level programs"

No, they don't. The BSDs have their own userland. If you mean the GNU Compiler Collection then you may have a point as all the major BSDs use this, but the BSDs are full operating systems in their own right, including userland.

Of course I did not mean to ignore Linux and the *BSD's. Without those we'd still be paying Sun $15K per Solaris box just to have something to run the above mentioned excellent software.

Interesting metric - loudest voice, who gets paid attention. Certainly O'Rielly's title "Essential System Administration" was a ground breaker for me - it helped me master the essentials of Linux back in 1992/93.

A different metric, perhaps more relevant perhaps not, is enablers: Larry Wall with PERL and I think diff/patch; the creators of GCC (and the GNU Project people in general) must be the most deeply enabling people - remember what it cost to get a UNIX system with C compiler back in the day? ... and of course *BSD/Linux use GNU for all the user level programs; the creators of Apache; the creators of PHP; the creators of Python.

Just my $0.02 worth.