While surely no one likes a recession, open-source software firms are finding an encouraging number of adoptions as the tightening economy forces companies to seek the best price point for their IT infrastructure. The Economist recently reported on the open-source sector, noting double-digit growth in the sector as a whole.

The CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst said, “Budgets are tight and we think that is good for open source." The figures appear to bear him out. In the case of Red Hat, growth year-over-year was 18% in the first quarter, the journal reports.

This trend comes with changes in the traditional software sector, which is displaying interest in open-source as well, The Economist notes, reporting that "... some open-source firms are starting to sell proprietary add-ons to open-source programs instead of charging to provide support to firms using open-source software. If current trends hold, traditional software firms and their open-source rivals will soon be hard to tell apart."

These days, rather than merely continuing the original focus behind open-source -- which was to free users from proprietary lock-ins -- open-source providers are adding databases, business intelligence, and CRM applications. Some, Cloudera, for instance, has begun distribution of its version of Hadoop, a solution for firms that need to process and analyze the enormous volumes of data generated by large websites, The Economist reports.

Beyond cost considerations alone, The Economist continues, the flexibility customers typically enjoy in their use of open-source solutions, unlike the constraints common to proprietary solutions, as well as the indemnification providers offer against intellectual property litigation is easing users' earlier concerns about liability issues. Both make open-source compellingly attractive.

Instead of adopting Linux as a way to poke a stick in Microsoft's eye, as was the case during the 1990s, The Economist notes that a more rational climate prevails today. "The key question is whether the savings in licensing fees for proprietary products outweigh the additional costs in manpower to integrate and operate the free alternative," the journal observes.

Another change in the open-source sector that The Economist notes is the shift in the business model most firms began with. Instead of giving away their solutions and charging for support -- a model that has demonstrated its shortcomings -- open-source firms are shifting to a model that involves selling proprietary extensions to an open-source core product, a model that finds favor with the venture capitalists who invested so heavily in free and open-source initially.

And the antipathy proprietary firms such as IBM and Microsoft once displayed toward open-source is now softening as both companies are introducing open-source programs in their product families, The Economist reports. IBM is even said to have an interest in buying Red Hat, as Oracle is doing with Sun.

Another impetus for change that The Economist identifies is cloud computing, which the journal predicts will make any distinctions between the traditional and open-source models of software business even less clear. A developing concern connected with cloud computing is the lock-in-like difficulty of moving data stored in a cloud to some other sector. “If you have a gigabyte somewhere, it develops a certain inertia,” says Mike Olson, the boss of Cloudera. The Economist reports that Cloudera recently found it could not switch from a poor storage service because there was no way to move the data.

As a consequence of the possibility of this sort of lock-in, an open-data movement is now growing. The Economist suggests that the industry may have to explore and exhaust a proprietary approach to solving this problem before the virtues of open-source manifest in this area.

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