MindTouch Announces First-Ever "Most Powerful Voices in Open Source" Ranking

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) March 17, 2010

MindTouch, the open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, today announced its publishing of the "Most Powerful Voices in Open Source" (MPV) ranking. The list presents the top 50 most vocal, followed and repeated/re-posted open source commentators, representing several spheres of influence, including media, vendors, OSS projects, standards bodies, community management and more.

Created by MindTouch, the MPV ranking draws from the wide array of metrics available through Web and Enterprise 2.0 channels, including Twitter, Google News alerts, unique online visitor counts and analysis of the related "buzz" of vendor/project affiliations. This compilation was created using the MindTouch platform, federating these data sources, applying varied weighting, and processing it for delivery of the ranking. The list, which includes members worldwide from organizations such as Ars Technica, Canonical, Google and SpringSource, is available in its entirety here: http://www.mindtouch.com/blog .

The top 5 MPVs are:

•     Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media
•     Linus Torvalds, founder of Linux, open source advocate
•     Chris Messina, open web advocate, Google
•     Miguel de Icaza, founder, Mono and Gnome projects
•     Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems

"It's about time someone has put together a metrics-based ranking of open source influencers," said Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM. "Community advocacy is the major thrust of the spirit of open source, and communities have leaders. This list does a great job of identifying those leading voices."

"Open source is collaborative by its very nature, and we are lucky to have so many vocal leaders communicating on the industry’s behalf," said Ian Howells, CMO, Alfresco. "The fact these voices from every avenue of influence – media, vendors and end-users alike – demonstrates the continued importance of open source and community collaboration."

"You’ll see that this ranking is no popularity contest, there are a number of surprises outside of the ‘usual suspects’ often seen on this type of list," said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch. "This is because we let the numbers do the talking, instead of an emotions-based market perception that too frequently comes into play."

MindTouch is the industry's leading provider of enterprise collaboration solutions in a market that continues to grow rapidly as more companies are operating under "lite" IT budgets for the foreseeable future. Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is predicted by Forrester to grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013.

About MindTouch
MindTouch set out to solve the problem of collaboration by making it possible for non-programmers to connect enterprise systems, databases and web-services in the context of an easy to use collaborative environment. The purpose of MindTouch is to provide wiki-like ease of collaboration between humans and machines; thereby enabling less-technology savvy people to automate reports and systems and create dashboards. For more information, please visit http://www.mindtouch.com.

Contact:
Michael Levey
Zer0 to 5ive
610-223-2632    

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