After reading about the stock market continuing to plummet on recession fears (CNN Money, MSNBC), I began to think back to the 2000/2001 time period when I started looking at GNU Linux and Open Source as a serious alternative to the familiar Microsoft and other proprietary tools and, later, my belief that I could use both kinds of tools successfully together. The Open Source world has changed dramatically since then. Red Hat, MySQL, and other Open Source software that have split into Enterprise (for fee) vs. Community (free) forks. I think the last post-dot-boom recession led a lot of us to look at FOSS tools. But, the FOSS market is quite different for this current (or upcoming) recession. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is just as expensive (or more so) than Microsoft Windows Server (although the CentOS community rebuild distro I use is still freely available). The so-called production-ready MySQL Enterprise Edition is also priced in the 4-figure range for what MySQL recommends for production services. Other so-called Enterprise ready tools are similarly priced compared to proprietary tools.

So, will the recession at the end of this decade see many of us look toward the tools that still mostly retain the free part of FOSS? Tools like PostgreSQL, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Ubuntu Linux for example?