Windows is a great platform for Open Source development. Microsoft has welcomed open source software to their platform (after all, free software is a good way to get people to use your paid OS) and has made it pretty easy (despite the closed-source nature of the platform itself) for developers to embrace Windows as an alternative open-source platform.
It's not as surprising as it seems - given that Windows is the world's most popular OS, it makes sense that famous open source projects like Firefox have great portions of their userbase firmly planted in the Windows world.
However, I am puzzled as to the author's choice of software for that list.... None of the 20 products he mentions would have made it to my top 100 list of greatest open source software for Windows.
I miss a few: Inno Setup (very good installer generator), eMule, Putty, Privoxy, Wireshark... it's strange that only Thunderbird is mentioned from Mozilla's offer.
In Windows there is also a lot of good freeware that's not open source: all the utilities from Sysinternals (now bought by Microsoft), Colin Wilson's resource editor, 7-zip compressor, Foxit...
It's not as surprising as it seems - given that Windows is the world's most popular OS, it makes sense that famous open source projects like Firefox have great portions of their userbase firmly planted in the Windows world.
However, I am puzzled as to the author's choice of software for that list.... None of the 20 products he mentions would have made it to my top 100 list of greatest open source software for Windows.