More than 50% of IT executives in a recent survey said that they were planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009. “As organisations fight to cut costs and find value in this tough economic climate, Linux adoption will accelerate,” said Michelle Beetar, country manager for Novell South Africa.

A new report out today from IDC, sponsored by Linux vendor Novell indicates that the current economic downturn is a good thing for Linux adoption. with more than half of the IT executives surveyed planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009.

We are in an economic downturn, perhaps even a full-blown recession. Any doubts I had about that were removed by two related, recent phenomena.

...occasionally I run into press articles that "round up" a half dozen such marketing misdirections from various marketing departments in one place. The December 1 BusinessWeek article called "Cost-Conscious Companies Turn to Open-Source Software" is such an article. And it's the second such multi-marketing-oriented misdirection article I've seen this week.

Currently Microsoft is feeling the full impact of the global economic slowdown. Reduced demand for its Windows OS & other software products has had a negative impact on the software giant. Both sales & profit are down. Meanwhile, Linux isn't feeling any impact at all.

The Eclipse Foundation has published the results of the global Eclipse Community Survey 2009 in The Open Source Developer ReportPDF. The Foundation held the survey from mid-April to mid-May in order to get developer feedback on the tools and software that they use. The organisation wanted to learn how the respondents used open source software and how they interacted with the Eclipse community.

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin says that Linux adoption is advancing two to three times faster than that of other platforms and that it will be boosted as companies consolidate their technical infrastructure during this economic downturn.

Conventional wisdom says Ubuntu’s popularity is limited to desktop PCs and laptops. However, a reader survey by Works With U reveals that nearly 80 percent of organizations running Ubuntu depend on at least one production Ubuntu server. Here’s the scoop.v

In a time when Microsoft is feeling the full impact of the global economic downturn, the open-source Linux operating system is flourishing.