Nervousness about the economy may drive down IT budgets, but won't necessarily reduce IT expectations, according to Ross Turk, community manager at SourceForge.net. He points out that "open source did really well the last time the economy took a turn for the worst. SourceForge.net saw a significant spike in downloads in late 2000 and 2001, and that's when a lot of the big commercial open source success stories saw huge growth as well." But new growth may come from smaller ventures, rather than larger vendors. That's because many open source developers work for large commercial vendors, and have to worry about job cutbacks. "So if history repeats itself, opens source consumption will boom, and commercial open source startups are in a time of opportunity."

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