The Fortress programming language is now catching on outside of Sun. During 2004-2006 it was an internal research project, funded in part by Sun's contract with DARPA for High Productivity Computer Systems. In January 2007 it became an open-source project with an open-source community. People outside Sun are now writing Fortress code, testing it using the open-source Fortress interpreter, and making contributions to the Fortress libraries. In this talk we will discuss some of the recent activity in this community as well as features of Fortress that have made it so appealing. While the language design was originally aimed at high-end ("petascale") parallel supercomputers, it appears also to be well-suited for programming multicore chip and multicore cluster systems.