Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Redhat, claimed the economic crisis would boost open source in the enterprise, relative to its commercial counterpart.
Compared to commercial software requiring high upfront licensing costs and providing less flexibility, FOSS might be doing better indeed. But the economic downturn might encourage CIOs to choose for the status quo and block or delay new projects. That will certainly do no good to Free and Open Source Software.

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.

One year ago, RedHat unveiled RedHat Exchange (RHX), a market place "focused on helping organizations of all sizes access the benefits of software solutions that are powered by open source".

RHX has changed a lot in one year, initially focusing on SMEs, but changing focus after less than stellar interest.

RedHat has just published "RHX: Lessons learned", mentioning some interesting points if you plan to launch a new product.

RedHat announced today that it settled a patent suit brought by Firestar Software Inc. and DataTern, Inc.

And RedHat confirms is not distanciating itself from its roots as it included protection not only for itself or its customers, but also for the community of open source developers.

EnterpriseDB, the company providing products based on the open source Postgresql database server, named a new CEO, Ed Boyajian, former Red Hat vice president and general manager of North American sales.

Although a minor release, version 5.2 brings enhancements mainly in 6 areas:

• Virtualization
• Laptop and Desktop improvements
• Encryption and Security
• Cluster & Storage Enhancements
• Networking & IPv6 Enablement
• Servicability

RedHat knows that such releases bring value to their subscription model, and they apparently work hard to bring quality.

The New York Stock Exchange-EuroNext is heavily relying on RedHat to run its infrastructure. And the justification is not only cost.

Microsoft announced that System Center will support the Linux distributions from RedHat and Suse. The solution is based on Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, where Microsoft will join the Steering comitee, and contribute code under the Microsoft Public License (OSI approved)

3 years after acquiring the technology from AOL, RedHat released the source code under open source licenses for its Certificate System under Project DogTag. Expected features of such a system are present: certificate management, revocation lists, certificate profiles, Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol and more.

Jim Whitehurst seems to have given several inteviews today, his 4th day on the job.
Worth mentioning is his ambition to take on Oracle and Microsoft. He also wants to grow the company from its $500 million business, saying Redhat should be a $5 billion company.

These are interesting times for the Free and Open Source companies. It was said Redhat could grow until now by avoiding bigger traditional players, but that it would have to change of strategy. It seems the time has come, and its new CEO isn't afraid.