2007 is shaping up to be a banner year for open source companies. SourceForge, which hosts almost 160,000 projects, just posted fiscal year 2007 revenues that showed a hefty 35 percent increase over 2006. Red Hat posted a 28 percent revenue increase on the year. And Novell's Suse is valued at approximately $210 million. What's more, numbers like these are bolstered by an unprecedented user acceptance of open source within the enterprise. According to research
conducted by Barracuda Networks (yeah, it's a security vendor), 53 percent of security managers would opt for open source, compared with 47 percent who would go for closed source solutions of equal merit.