Posted 11/14/08 at 12:00:00 PM by David Murphy

If you haven't noticed the general collapse of the financial system around you, coupled with the massive switch to corporate cost-savings mechanisms (including a healthy dose of "rightsizing" by every company under the sun), then you need to stop playing Wrath of the Lich King and flip on the news.  Money is important, but perhaps never as important to the general corporate well-being as right now.

It's no surprise then that good ol' open source hardware and software platforms are being thrown into the mix now more than ever.  Semantic arguments aside, the open source movement is generally consider a cheaper, if not free alternative to proprietary, commercial software in the enterprise market.  But that doesn't mean that open-source software comes without a cost, nor are these companies necessarily immune to the financial movements of the technological industry. So where, then, does open-source development rest in the spectrum? Can these solutions do enough to save the bottom lines of big business?  Or are open-source companies just as doomed by a market slowdown as the software vendors on the other side of the fence?

Click the jump to find out!

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Software, open-source, hardware, proprietary, enterprise, business, market, recession