RedHat published a press release detailing their Q1 financial results. Revenue increased 32%, and operating cash flow Increased by 60% Year-over-Year.

Impressive numbers, further analysed by Matt Asay.

Companies spent $21 billion in 2007 on the Linux server platform, in hardware, software and services, said IDC. And that amount is expected to grow to $49 billion in 2011. And software expenses were at $10 billion, which is still a tiny part of the global software market, evaluated at $242 billion.

Matthew Aslett, from The 452 Group, brings a short analysis of the power of the GPL and BSD licenses for software makers. The reasoning is that the fact that BSD allows anyone to add proprietary bits makes it easier for competitors to overtake the main developer of the project. Worth reading if you plan to publish your software under an open source license.

Free and open source software is spreading at all levels of the IT landscape, and even in proprietary offerings.
Gartner even predicts that by 2012, 80% of proprietary offerings will include some FOSS elements.
Using open source source enables companies to exploit the power of stable and proven tools to build on. Why start from scratch when you can use an existing base.
This is not a new practice (the TCP/IP stack in Windows NT was derived from the BSD stack), but will only grow with time.

This also increases the importance of education on the different free and open source licenses, and their respective implications. Distributing GCC in a proprietary offering (like Microsoft does with Services For Unix) is different from linking a program with a library under the GPL, which is different from integrating BSD licensed code in your software.

As seen on The Open road.

IDC reports that Linux deployment growth has slowed dramatically to the point of reaching negative growth, making it loose market share compared to windows. The interpretation of these numbers are that the easiest migrations from Unix have now been done, and that we are entering a new stage of Linux' presence in the enterprise. Microsoft's vision is that Linux' market share will now stagnate because "Linux is primarily deployed in two workloads—high-performance computing and as Web servers". Another interpretation is that as easier Unix migrations are done, Linux vendors will have to take on Microsoft directly and compete on big ERP, CRM and databases deployments.