Open source in itself is a success story. From being a niche concept, it has become a mainstream movement (well, more or less) and has received the attention of both individuals and businesses worldwide.

There are thousands of open source projects and products out there, but which ones are the most successful? By successful we mean widely used and widely known. While there are many successful open source products, a few stand head and shoulders above the rest. We have listed them here below.

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We here at Pingdom LOVE technology, but for a while now we’ve had a nagging suspicion that regular people – the broad masses if you will – really couldn’t care less about tech, including Web tech.

A look at Google’s daily list of the top 100 hot search trends pretty much confirms that suspicion.

Over a ten-day period, only 8 out of 1,000 trending topics on Google were in any way tech related.

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Open Source is an interesting subject, not to mention that the Open Source movement has become a true power through the years, providing us with a great range of freely available software.

From time to time we’ve looked at different aspects of Open Source in this blog, so we decided to cherry-pick some of our very best Open Source-related articles and present them for your reading pleasure.

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IPv6 can theoretically hold 2^128 IP addresses. As you’re probably aware of, that’s a huge number:

2^128 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

Have you ever wondered how you would actually SAY that number if you had to read it out loud?

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The newly released Wolfram Alpha is a great tool for doing calculations and data conversions, and it also has a significant amount of data that you can play around with. This post is about how webmasters and sysadmins can benefit from this new service.

So if you’re a webmaster or sysadmin (or just an Internet geek), let Wolfram Alpha’s two supercomputers do some work for you and make your life a bit easier.

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That constant blog companion, the RSS feed, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. These days RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but that wasn’t always the case. The meaning of RSS has changed a number of times since its initial inception in 1999.

Here is a look at the evolution of the meaning of RSS.

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Amazon has just launched a pretty cool service for those of its AWS customers who have large amounts of data that they want to upload to Amazon S3: AWS Import/Export. It’s essentially what used to be called a sneakernet, i.e. you can just mail your data on hard drives to Amazon via snail mail instead of sending it over the Internet.

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In the blue corner… Google! In the red corner… SEO! … aaaaaaand, FIGHT!

Is it just us, or are the results from search engines getting out of control? Often several of the top ten search results will contain websites that seem to have received their position mainly through SEO efforts, not by being truly great resources (at least not great enough to be in the top ten).

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Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, which beats all the other large tech companies we looked at, including big hitters like Microsoft, Apple, Intel and IBM.

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The Wolfram Alpha team has revealed some information about its hardware setup on their team blog. If you haven’t heard about Wolfram Alpha, it’s a soon-to-be launched “computational knowledge engine” with an interface similar to a search engine. There’s been a lot of buzz about it, for example on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.

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