Whether the ailing economy is real or imagined, you might be looking for ways to shed some pounds off your bloated IT budget. You should seriously consider Linux and Open Source software to put your 2009 financial appetite on a diet. Here are 10 reasons to choose Linux in a bad economy and none of them have to do with the fact that Linux is free.

We’ve talked recently about how the down economy can be both good and bad for Linux and open source software in general.

With crushing inevitability, the House of Lords did nothing to stop the deeply flawed Digital Economy Bill yesterday -- and that means a badly written and potentially disastrous new law is nearly on the statute books. We have just two weeks to stop it -- and stop it we must.

The economy is falling as fast as temperatures in November. Recession seems certain, if it's not already here. The stock market's performance resembles Disney World's Space Mountain roller coaster. And every open source vendor, every Linux project, will be touched in one way or another.

Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst has good reason to be optimistic. In his first full year as CEO of the Linux vendor, Whitehurst, a former Delta Airlines executive, has managed to pilot Red Hat into growth territory despite the overall turbulence in the global economy.

Here's a question I get all the time: how big is the free economy? That's harder to answer than you might think, for both definition and measurement reasons. But here's a first pass at doing it anyway.

This is actually a white paper review by Microsoft about a company that went with Microsoft over Linux. The story has a misleading title - as the move had little to do with economy or Linux, and more to do with a lack of skill or investment in skill to manage a very small Linux environment.

0 A.D. (pronounced "zero ey-dee") is a free, open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. In short, it is a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of Western civilizations, focusing on the years between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D.

Despite a struggling economy and public debt, the Hungarian government continues to spend millions on Microsoft licences when cheaper alternatives exist, say open source groups.