While the recession has battered many U.S. software companies, Red Hat — which has staked its future on open-source Linux software, virtualization and cloud computing — has flourished.

The recession is proving to be an opportune time for Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) as it continues to grow revenues and earnings. According to Red Hat executives, the growth is coming at the expense of rivals and as a result of customer confidence in the abilities of Linux and Red Hat's JBoss middleware platform. The growth of Red Hat's business is not however a sign of bloat.

There’s a lot of chatter going around that open source excels in recession environments. I’m a little on the fence about that claim... but what I’m interested in talking about today is whether open source benefits anyone looking for a job right now. In theory, if open source companies grow in a recession, they should also be hiring.

With the pressure of the recession bearing down on companies, several industry experts expect adoption of open source software to grow, as a result.

Normally IT gets walloped in a recession, with new projects put on hold until the economy thaws. Take the 2001 recession, for example, which saw IT budgets that had been growing 12.9% per year shrink to a 2.8% growth. In such circumstances, enterprises have traditionally placed existing projects on life support while cutting off the air supply to new projects.

Today's news that TSE (Tokyo Stock Exchange) has moved to Red Hat's RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as the operating platform for its next-generation "Arrowhead" trading system shouldn't come as a surprise. Linux has become the smart stock market's operating system of choice.

WHILE THE GLOBAL recession may have many down in the dumps, it's apparently good news for Linux, with market research outfit IDC claiming it's going to come out of the crunch a winner.

Lofty oil prices. Sub-prime mortgage woes. Financial companies (Citigroup, Etrade) stumbling badly. Ouch. Ouch. And Ouch. Whispers of a potential recession ahead continue. That made The VAR Guy wonder: If the U.S. heads into a recession soon, are open source companies better positioned to weather the storm than their closed source counterparts? Let’s take a look.

The Deutsche Borse Group manages the International Securities Exchange, an equity options exchange, in New York and the Eurex and Deutsche Borse's own Xetra cash exchange. The Xetra stock exchange platform is also used by the Irish Stock Exchange, the European Energy Exchange, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange among others. It's long used Linux as the basis of these high-speed stock exchanges.