As web developers, it is paramount that we educate ourselves on the latest techniques, trends, software, and coding. If you don’t, you will not achieve being an in demand designer/developer.
Open source software is coming out from the geeks into the real world. Many open source products have reached enough scale and maturity to seriously challege their proprietary software counterparts. Claims by proprietary software firms that open source products suffer from a higher lifecycle cost and lack good quality support appear to be a case of sour grapes given the rapid proliferation of open source products.