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.

Dana Blankenhorn makes some good points in a post from today titled Open Source in a Time of Recession. One of the better points is that, despite the incredible turmoil in global markets and economies, we actually haven't met the official definition of a recession yet here in the U.S., which would be two consecutive quarters without economic growth.

Linux vendor Red Hat will report its fiscal 2010 numbers today. Virtualization, cloud services, middleware, a big win on the Tokyo Stock Exchange-- is Red Hat's future as rosy as it appears?

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.

IBM put out a study datelined one minute past midnight this Thursday morning commenting on the fact that outside of netbooks, the recession has largely put the kibosh on PC growth. There is according to IBM, however, an area of PC investment that actually saves money.

The Bordeaux Technology Group is proud to announce a 50% off recession busting sale on Bordeaux for Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, PCBSD and OpenIndiana. With the current US unemployment rate hovering near 10% and rumors of the possibility of a double dip recession. We want to do our part to help save individuals and small business as much money as we can on their Wine related software needs.

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.

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.