Software development companies embrace open source approach

...Aras’s revenues have increased 50 percent each year, on average; client downloads of Aras ­software are up tenfold, to more than 1,000 companies each month, from 100 in 2007....Aras, of Andover, is among a number of Massachusetts companies following the pioneering path of Red Hat Inc., and basing their businesses on open source software, where the underlying source code to run ­applications is available for free.

Moreover, the trend of migrating corporate computing systems to offsite “cloud” systems could accelerate the use of open source products, creating even more business for those firms.

“If you have an open source system in the cloud and it needs to grow, you just add another server,” said Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc., in Cambridge. “You don’t have to worry about adding another license, because it’s free. That’s very appealing.”