The open source software industry has an unlikely benefactor–it turns out that the global recession is one of the best friends that open source can have as businesses from large to small that are looking to save money have been opening their IT shop doors wide and giving it a try.

According to a new Worldwide Open Source Software 2009-2013 Forecast, conducted by Boston-based International Data Corp., open source software (OSS) revenues have heated up as the global economy and recession worsened last year, and it looks like the trend will continue. How much will it grow? The study reports that global OSS revenue for 2008 was $2.9 billion, which is expected to grow by 34% in 2009 to $3.9 billion. By 2013, that global revenue growth is expected to hit $8.1 billion.

“The OSS market has seen a strong boost from the current economic crisis,” said Michael Fauscette, the IDC Software Business Solutions division analyst who wrote the forecast. “OSS is increasingly a part of the enterprise software strategy of leading businesses and is seeing mainstream adoption at a strong pace.”

There is, however, a reality check here–those revenue numbers still pale compared to the global revenues earned by sales of proprietary software applications by a huge margin. According to IDC figures, proprietary software revenues in 2008 dwarfed the OSS revenues–$137.3 billion compared to $2.9 billion, while projected revenues in 2009 are $138.8 billion for proprietary vendors and $3.9 billion for OSS. By 2013, the revenue gap is still huge and favoring proprietary products–$169.5 billion compared to OSS’s $8.1 billion.

The good news for OSS, however, is that the recent revenue growth spurt for the industry comes at a good time and does show its promise, Fauscette said. “It’s a big percentage of small numbers,” he said. “It’s still early but there’s still a lot of room to grow.”

At the same time, though, OSS revenues won’t likely be catching up to the rest of the software market any time soon. “I don’t see any huge enormous threat or danger right now for the big software companies’ bottom lines but over time… it’s going to continue to grow,” Fauscette said. “I think the days of ignoring it are gone. This is mainstream stuff now. This is not like the Wild West and you’re [not] taking a risk doing this. Companies understand that.”

In addition to the global recession fueling OSS revenues, another key factor is that open source is seen as a far more acceptable and worthwhile alternative–especially one that can save money for cash-strapped corporations–than ever before in its brief history, Fauscette said. That new-found acceptance is critical to the fast recent growth of OSS, he said.

“[Open source] companies are gaining customers,” he said. “It’s not just operating systems anymore. It’s not just Linux, it’s still moving up the stack, to middleware and applications.”

But that hasn’t happened everywhere, he admitted. “On the desktop, open source hasn’t really made a dent,” he said. “Ubuntu has grown but is not huge. Last year we started to see huge growth in middleware.”

via Linux.com