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Open Source Software is about more than just the Linux operating system, and 2008 brought advances in the form of OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, Firefox and Android. But Linux is still the heart of the FOSS movement, and this year brought key developments in the operating system as well.

While 2008 has been a bleak year for the financial markets and the global economy, it has been very kind to open source, at least based on market share. A review of Net Applications data suggests that there has never been a better time for open source; however, as Google Trends data suggests, it's no longer enough to rest on one's open-source laurels.

A New York software company has announced the scheduled release of its open-source wind farm design software. Albany-based AWS TrueWind designed the openWind software so that a range of end users, from individuals to wind energy developers, could apply and adapt the software their own particular set of data.

The advent of Linux-powered netbooks, the launch of Google's Android and Chrome, and Nokia's move to snap up Symbian pushed open source further into the mainstream, despite ongoing legal wrangling.

The year 2008 showed open source -- both in the form of Linux specifically and as a software development model generally -- coming into the mainstream like never before.

I'm a fan of many kinds of offbeat open source efforts, and the idea of community contributions can be applied to any number of pursuits, as seen previously in this post. This week I came across a few eyebrow-raising open source stories worthy of another short roundup. Here, you'll find four unusual examples of left-field open source in action.