Is Open Source Recession Proof ? Depends.
Category Administration Open Source
The knives are out. BusinessWeek notes a "strategic shift [which] could alter the competitive landscape of the tech world." Rather than simply freezing budgets or dumping projects, companies are adopting new technologies:
Displacing commercial vendors sounds bleak for the future of Microsoft and SAP, but there is also a lot of competition within open-source suppliers. It can be as subtle as doing a Google search for the ebox-platform, a full-featured, open-source router system. What lands on the top of the return page is a paid link to Untangle, another open-source (and, much better funded) router platform.
Or, look at the recent promotion by Novell's SUSE to offer support for RedHat. Of course, the motivation for their generosity is a program to migrate users away from RedHat and into SuSE Linux Enterprise.
Sun Microsystems just sliced off 18% of its staff, less than a year after buying up open-source MySQL for about $1 billion. The internal turmoil at Sun must be white-hot as it drops commercial lines of business, trims up marketing staff and turns to seed opportunity with its open-source products.
The recession can be expected to be kinder to most open-source solutions than for most proprietary systems. But in these tight times, don't expect there to be any brotherhood between companies just because they foster open-source principals. There will be winners and losers in open-source, as with any other business model.
Everyone has payrolls to meet and mortgages to keep.
Technorati Tags: Ebox-Platform, Open-Source, RedHat, Sun Microsystems
The knives are out. BusinessWeek notes a "strategic shift [which] could alter the competitive landscape of the tech world." Rather than simply freezing budgets or dumping projects, companies are adopting new technologies:
These technologies existed during the last recession, but they were immature. Now they're established, and the downturn seems likely to hasten their adoption. Chief among them are software delivered over the Internet, known as cloud computing. . . so-called virtualization software . . . and open-source software.
Displacing commercial vendors sounds bleak for the future of Microsoft and SAP, but there is also a lot of competition within open-source suppliers. It can be as subtle as doing a Google search for the ebox-platform, a full-featured, open-source router system. What lands on the top of the return page is a paid link to Untangle, another open-source (and, much better funded) router platform.
Or, look at the recent promotion by Novell's SUSE to offer support for RedHat. Of course, the motivation for their generosity is a program to migrate users away from RedHat and into SuSE Linux Enterprise.
Sun Microsystems just sliced off 18% of its staff, less than a year after buying up open-source MySQL for about $1 billion. The internal turmoil at Sun must be white-hot as it drops commercial lines of business, trims up marketing staff and turns to seed opportunity with its open-source products.
The recession can be expected to be kinder to most open-source solutions than for most proprietary systems. But in these tight times, don't expect there to be any brotherhood between companies just because they foster open-source principals. There will be winners and losers in open-source, as with any other business model.
Everyone has payrolls to meet and mortgages to keep.
Technorati Tags: Ebox-Platform, Open-Source, RedHat, Sun Microsystems
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Posted by Tom At 01:29:04 AM On 12/18/2008 | - Website - |