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Red Hat CEO Says Economic Crisis Favors Open Source
arashtamere writes "Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst predicts the enterprise open source software business will emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market. 'I've had a couple of conversations with CIOs who said, "We're a Microsoft shop and we don't use any open source whatsoever, but we're already getting pressure to reduce our operating costs and we need you to help put together a plan for us to... use open source to reduce our costs." And we've had other customers literally looking at ripping and replacing WebLogic or WebSphere for JBoss ... I think we'll know in about six to nine months but there is no question that open source will come out of this in relatively better shape than our proprietary competitors,' he told Computerworld."
It's not as if Red Hat doesn't negotiate enterprise and volume licensing just like Microsoft. Since Red Hat is a much smaller company with lower overhead and a product that doesn't cost nearly as much to maintain thanks to the slave labor, uh, I mean, volunteer efforts of the open source community, they have a lot more wiggle room.
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