SiliconGrassland.com

It seems these days that the fear mongering has taken over the news, and a lot of people’s minds. I’ve been hearing from every corner of business lately that the world is ending. It’s not.

DataSync had it’s best month ever in terms of new subscribers last month, and we’re already past that in October. People haven’t stopped doing business, but they have changed how they do it. We happen to host and integrate open source software, which is a much more cost effective alternative to expensive onsite proprietary software.

For those of you in businesses that deliver little value with high upfront cost: beware. The world is ending for you. Our professional services business has slowed significantly, and our hosting business has picked up. I would guess that we’re not the only ones. Businesses are cutting back on expensive consulting projects and moving towards more flexible open solutions.

As I have been in the past, I’m very bullish on all things open. As Matt Asay has mentioned, the recession will be kind to open source companies:

Open source breeds communities, which in turn add value to the software, making this innovation more of a group effort (and, hence, potentially a less costly effort). In turn, open source should be a big winner in this downturn, just as it was in 2000 to 2001.

I’ve gotta agree with Matt here, open source drives a lot of value in a down market. We’ll see what things look like in 6 months