Global Economy 0 - Open Source 1

The global economic slowdown has of course been mostly bad news for most people, business verticals and individual companies. But it's important to remember that recessions can also be good as they flush out the old dead wood and help us to re-position for leaner and more economically efficient times ahead. Can we take this reality forward then and apply it to open source?

James Falkner is community manager for free and open source enterprise portal company Liferay and he contends that the future of open source has been shaped by external circumstances like the economic crisis.

Falkner suggests that owing to the economic recession (which forced a re-think of budgets and investments) and the advances made over the last decade in web development that led to successful open source business models, open source has become a "de facto standard" in most of the world...