Admitting that he swiped this observation from a fellow software exec, Schwartz continues: "[A]s we enter the new year, you should expect 2005 to be one in which we place an ever heightening focus on our dialog with the community, and the developer community in particular."

"One community with whom we've maintained a strong (nothing's ever perfect) dialog over the past few years," he adds, "is the Java developer community. It's vibrant and thriving, not only among the ranks of commercial companies, but also the looser, self-managing communities (where there are some truly outstanding examples of community engagement and dialog)."

Schwartz expands on the strands to this dialog with Java developers as follows:

"The principal mechanisms through which we've maintained that dialog are the Java Community Process (the most comprehensive open process in the history of computing); and the evolution of our NetBeans open source development environment."

In a rare (for him) moment of praise for Red Hat, Schwartz next pays tribute to RH's Postgres:

"Another really interesting and growing community is the open source database community. There are some really interesting (and rapidly growing) open source databases out there. Not many folks talk about them, curiously. The most interesting to me are Red Hat's database, known as Postgres, and MySQL. For the most part, those products lead the open source database world."

"The world needs a strong cross platform Web browser," Schwartz declares, "and the Mozilla team has done an outstanding job. And I'd put the Firefox community (enabled by the Mozilla Public License), near the top of all open source community efforts."

In a reference to Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Bake, he adds: "Hats off, Mitchell."

The last community Schwartz singles is the OpenOffice community, which he observes is "alive and well, too - as the foundation for commercially supported suites (StarOffice among them), and as the most popular and affordable alternative to Microsoft's Office."

By last count, Schwartz writes, "it's got to be one of the most popular open source products on the planet."