2008, the Buzzwords that were

The common buzzwords heard in the year 2008 were recession, credit-crunch, bankruptcy, bailout and others related to the financial markets as it was a year when the global economy faced huge downturn. Amidst this economic meltdown, Linux was another buzz. The open source market share did show quite interesting trends which is a good sign for it to hit better scores in the markets in 2009. Open Source projects are considered to be more viable and are being used on a broader platform. Open Source is doing well because it not only targets to provide products, but in addition provides services that are worth having as well. Most open-source companies make the bulk of their revenues from subscriptions, which are considered to be highly profitable. Some traditional OSS companies that have now started aggressively to obtain patents (e.g. Red Hat) are examples of profitable businesses.

We can agree to the fact the open source isn’t a great economy, but undoubtedly it holds benefits. The traffic is considerably up at open-source websites. All the repositories (Sourceforge, Google code etc) holds high number of current projects and each one of them is gaining large number of new open-source projects in the year 2009.

The release of figures of browser’s share trend showed that Internet Explorer is below 70% and Google’s Chrome is at 1.04%. Reaching nearly 22 percent worldwide market share is a significant milestone for Firefox. IE was close to 100% of the market a few years ago. IE had no competitors and that was one of the main reasons for its downfall. Firefox developers are on their feet to do better and reap the benefits of having well funded and extremely ambitious browser team. This shows that we are entering into diversified environment with not any particular browser leading it. The open standards and its distribution is what ultimately matters.

Windows OS slides down at nearly 89% of the operating system share trend followed by Mac and Linux with nearly 10% and 1% respectively. But these OS are moving aggressively towards the mobile market which is their market in real sense to provide services and add value for their customers. This will surrender considerably more of the market to Linux.

Sales at open-source software companies are booming, even as stock prices slump. As the recession puts pressure on tech spending, many companies are turning to open-source software. The economic meltdown is fueling a mini boom in the world of open source. The benefits of open source extend well beyond cost savings .Commercial open source is coming into its own can is proved by the fact that the revenues have dramatically increased for Red Hat and Novell Linux in 2008.

The open source, an interesting business model of most of the freely distributed software and created by group of programmers across the globe for which minimal fees are charged is one whose time has come. Open source has hit its stride, and it must be preferred for enterprise requirements as it provides highest level of interoperability.

What does Open Source have for us in the year 2009?