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."

Comments

I've heard they've got legendary support

[Gazzonyx]

No doubt. Red Hat is the only company that I know of that will support other vendors apps to the point of fixing it themselves, or even having one of their kernel devs patch Linux. If fact, Red Hat is the only company that I know of that can really claim that they can get fixes for customers directly in to both the mainline Linux kernel and Samba. My understanding is they'll also support any of the products created by the thousands of vendors that are part of the Red Hat Exchange. Microsoft just can't offer that, even if they wanted to.