Tough Times: Open Source’s New Big Cause
Belt-tightening and budget-butchering all-embracing are the order of the day. Now’s the time for commercial marketers of open source to show what they’re caused of.
We’ve read of critical forecastings about what will happen to the software industry in the coming years -everything from Red Hat looking for a customer to Sun finally going bankrupt.
Companies that have a firm account of experience with marketing and backing up open source - Red Hat, Alfresco and SugarCRM will endure this without too much trouble. If they’ve determined how to run lean and mean from the origin to stay in advance of the commercial rivalry, that experience will all compensate here. Those who began lowly, and stayed small and pass on their feet, will live all this down. Some of them will come out as worthy models for how open source makes economic sense in some good times and bad.