And yet there are some interesting tidbits in the Fifth Annual Future of Open Source Survey.

So with a grain of salt fully taken, it is worth noting that the 450 respondents — a mix of users and vendors — found that the most attractive thing about open software is lack of vendor lock-in.  For the previous four years, the biggest perceived benefit of open source was lower cost.

The top barrier to adoption cited this year, was the lack of internal technical skills. In the past the biggest hurdle had been worry over legalities and liabilities of using open source software.

That is extremely noteworthy to Michael Skok, general partner with North Bridge.

In the past, companies worried about “legal concerns about licensing and whether open source software conforms to corporate standards,” Skok said.

That may have eased up because long-running SCO litigation has disappeared and probably even more because of a much more open-source-friendly stance by Microsoft. You know, the company whose CEO once likened open source to cancer. Many in the open source community feared that Microsoft might launch patent or copyright litigation over the use of open source software. That concern is lifting.

“Microsoft came to Acquia, recognizing that Drupal was so mainstream they didn’t want to compete with it but would rather have it running on the Microsoft stack. So they are co-marketing with us and drove tens of thousands downloads of Drupal.” Drupal is an open source collection of content management tools for building social networking applications.

Also interesting in the new results is that the most appealing thing about open source is the avoidance of vendor lock-in. That supplants the traditional benefit usually topping the list: Low cost.

Given the unified data center push by vendors like Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard tout the “one throat to choke” mantra, it is interesting that many data center customers don’t show all that much interest in getting all of their hardware/software from one vendor.

The 451 Group helped conduct the survey, as did several vendors including open source stalwarts like the aforementioned Acquia, Blackduck, Cloudera, Eucalpytus, Novell, Red Hat, Jaspersoft and (drum roll please) Microsoft.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Check out more open source news on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com and follow us on Twitter

The grant was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which manages the CrisisCommons project. The grant will aid OSU OSL “open source” crisis efforts including hosting core CrisisCommons training resources and using open source to build a model for efficient crisis and disaster response.

CrisisCommons is a young organization – it formed after the devastating January 2010 Haiti earthquake and partnered with the OSU OSL after it needed help with its infrastructure. The organization has also aided in the Chile earthquake relief efforts, floods in Tennessee and Pakistan, and has built numerous applications using open source technology for relief efforts, including a “Person Finder” and “Tradui,” a Creole translation app.

According to Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Outreach Manager with the OSL, the partnership on more projects like these was a no-brainer.

“Our mission is to help open source projects, and it’s even better when we can help open source projects with a mission focused on humanitarian aid and the public good,” said Hawthorn.

But why is open source playing such an important role in crisis efforts? For one, the minimal cost of open source software is huge for countries with fewer economic resources, according to Hawthorn. There are more practical, important reasons, though.

“Open source systems allow for rapid, real-time innovation by volunteers,” said Hawthorn. “CrisisCommons’ Crisis Camps are excellent examples of how hundreds of individuals can come together and contribute their skills as developers to alleviate suffering, all of which is made possible because the source code they are improving is open source.”

To learn more about the OSL, CrisisCommons and this grant, check out CrisisCommons’ announcement about the partnership.

GroundWork CEO Peter Jackson explained that the monitoring tool should help data center admins who are wary of the cloud feel better.

“The insecurity that any IT decision-maker has today, with Cloud is that they are going to lose control, said Jackson. “We can assure them that they will not lose control.”

The monitoring tool can be used on Amazon EC2 cloud or in the traditional data center.

“We think supporting both use cases is important,” said Simon Bennett, Sr. Director of Product Management at GroundWork. “We don’t think it makes sense to have multiple configuration systems any more than it makes sense to have multiple monitoring systems.”

GroundWork is recruiting participants for the GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud beta program. The monitoring program allows data center admins to correlate and visualize application availability and performance info simultaneously across the in-house datacenter, a Eucalyptus private cloud, and Amazon EC2. Interested parties must go through a screening process for acceptance into the program, and a participant-oriented webcast preview will be held on April 13.

The beta program offers:

• GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud usage to cover on-premise, public or private cloud hosted applications and infrastructure
• Access to Eucalyptus EE, including VMware support to implement private clouds in existing environments.
• The opportunity to provide direct feedback to the engineering and product teams, helping define the future of IT operations in the cloud.
• Engineering and technical assistance for the duration of the beta program.

Beta participants will be able to:

• Quickly and easily build and monitor private and hybrid clouds with your existing environment and other public clouds
• Run Amazon Machine Image (AMI) instances on VMware-based hypervisors within your Eucalyptus private cloud
• Seamlessly manage environments with multiple hypervisors (Xen, KVM, vSphere, ESX™ and ESXi™) under one management console and transition applications without any modifications
• Manage service performance and availability based on IT monitoring insight trend and usage reports across environments.

Here are summaries of his predictions:

1. As the economy worsens, adoption of open source software will increase .
2. Open source adoption will accelerate across the full infrastructure software stack and into applications.
3. SaaS and cloud computing solutions will grow and pull open source with it.
4. Mergers and acquisitions of open source vendors will continue.
5. Competition from open source will drive proprietary software vendors to take the first steps in changing their business models.
6. Open source stacks will emerge from strong market partnerships.
7. Systems integrators will guarantee first-year cost savings for migrations to open source.

For the most part, I’m with him. As budgets tighten, it only makes sense that “free” will flourish. We hear that consumers are only looking for sales these days, so why wouldn’t companies? With this increase generally, and as more acceptance and trust of open source occurs, it seems natural that it will extend through the stack and through more applications (e.g., Vyatta has been busy releasing three open source networking appliances in 2008). And perhaps the upside of a down job market is that some programmers, with free time on their hands, can finish projects they had on the back burner. In 2008, we heard a lot of buzz about the cloud, and this cost-conscious computing model pairs well with open source. If you buy the cloud hype, you can easily see the increased opportunity for open source adoption that it provides.

We know that open source gained ground in the enterprise, and we even saw major proprietary software vendors change their tune (if not their business models) — ceding some ground to open source devotees.

What are your predictions for open source? Share them below or make your case against Burkhardt’s divinations.

Just in time for the holidays, HP released it’s preinstalled SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP2 on its HP Compaq dc5850. (I wonder if the name SLED is a coincidence, or if they held off the release to get it out with the snowy weather?) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has already been reviewing SLED 10 SP2 on his blog, noting that the main improvements surround interoperability with Microsoft. He shares that the new version of SLED supports read and write access to local NTFS drive partitions and has better active directory integration. Vaughn-Nichols installed SLED and encountered a few kinks — a hassle that can be avoided in HP’s preinstalled offering.

But if all of that sounds too practical, or dare I say too boring, fear not — Ken Hess has provided a Linux geek wish list for the 2008 holiday season.You may already have a Linux mobile phone, but do you have a Chumby? Hess points out that all of these gadgets have Linux inside. What more could you want?

1. Asus Eee PC
2. Chumby
3. MusicPal
4. LimeBook
5. Linux-based phones
6. Amazon Kindle
7. MVIX MX-760HD
8. Garmin Nuvi880
9. Nokia N810
10. TiVo

But if you don’t want to spend a bunch of dough, Matt Hartley provides some ideas of “homemade” items that you can give your family and friends by putting your Linux skills to use.

… by utilizing your existing computer system, chances are you already have access to what you need to build a really great gaming rig, with the right open source videos games. Enter PlayDeb for Ubuntu. Whether you download each game individually or opt to give the “gift of plenty” all at once, there are more games here than most people would likely have ever imagined.

From Second Life to a number of very well done first-person shooters, even 3D strategy games, just about anything you might conceive of is available here — at no cost whatsoever.

Hartley also suggests updating an unused notebook and giving the gift of Internet, anywhere, to a loved one. Or spread the joy to your community and give “an off-lease or even totally used PC preloaded with Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE or PCLinuxOS.”

In its year-end fiscal report yesterday, the Waltham, Mass.-based company reported that open source products, primarily Linux, rose $34.8 million or 37% to $128.8 million in 2008. Fourth-quarter open source revenues rose just a whisker less or 36.1% to $35.7 million.

The increases far outstripped Novell’s other three product divisions, which are identity and security management, systems and resource management, and its workgroup division.

For the 2008 fiscal year, Novell’s total revenues were $957 million, compared with $932 million in 2007, and its net annual loss was $9 million in 2008, compared with a net loss of $44 million the previous year.

Thanks to aggressive pricing and key partnerships with companies such as Microsoft and SAP, the company’s Linux growth rates far exceeded the 22% increase in the overall Linux market, said Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian. SUSE Linux Enterprise, which grew its market share an additional 3% in 2007, added 3,000 new Linux customers this year, including many large enterprises, he said.

Hovsepian added that Microsoft has sold $195 million of the $240 million in SUSE Linux certificates it bought as part of the 2006 pact between the two companies and has purchased an additional $25 million so far this year, Hovsepian said. In 2008, Novell also has increased its independent software vendor agreements significantly, he added.

Discussing the company as a whole, Hovsepian said Novell has made great progress over the past two years, achieved all its milestones for 2008 and, in turn, stabilized and strengthened the company. While acknowledging that the current uncertain economic climate doesn’t lend to detailed forecasts, Hovsepian said Novell will continue to strive for operational improvement and long-term profitability.

Therefore, Red Hat decided to donate the money it would have spent on its annual party to charity. Following the results of an employee poll, Red Hat will send the funds to Chicago, Ill.-based Feeding America, a national organization that funds more than 200 food banks, including several in North Carolina.

Although Red Hat declined to reveal the amount of its donation, the company said the funds were enough to pay for 800,000 meals by Feeding America or 1 million pounds of food and grocery products, a Red Hat spokeswoman said.

In addition, Red Hat offices in Raleigh as well as Westford, Mass., are organizing canned food drives for the hungry; Raleigh executives have pledged a donation for every 500 cans donated at its headquarters office.

“We just felt it was the wrong time to be spending a lot of money on ourselves,” DeLisa Alexander, Red Hat’s senior vice president for people and band, told the Raleigh News & Observer. “I don’t see us going back [to big parties]. People want to work for a company that is socially responsible.”

In an obvious swipe at its larger rival, Waltham, Mass.-based Novell Inc. crowed this week that SUSE Linux Enterprise has surpassed all other Linux distros with 2,500 vendor-certified applications running on top of its operating system. If true, this would be quite astonishing since Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. has a far larger Linux market share.

Upon querying Novell’s PR agency, Andover, Mass.-based Pan Communications Inc. responded with a link to the Red Hat  Software Catalog which lists 2,166 certified software vendors, not applications, so Novell isn’t comparing apples to apples.

A Red Hat spokeswoman said, however, that there are 3,400 vendor applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This is silliness. I feel like a mom telling two toddlers to go back to their sandboxes. (Red Hat is not really at fault here since it didn’t rush forth with a counterpunch.)  I’m probably more fascinated than the competition between these two companies and their strategies than anyone else I know. But this little self-promotion was a waste of time. And Novell, with its carefully worded misleading statements, has a lot to lose: its credibility. Let’s declare the “I’m bigger than you are” nonsense all over. Let’s all get back to work.

My recent story on the dimming of the LAMP stack sparked a thoughtful reader response from John Locke, the manager of Seattle-based Freelock Computing. The story concluded that while an all-open source stack is still a valid concept, there are many more open source options that LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl, Python, PHP) is largely irrelevant.  I made a single exception for Apache, the popular Web server.

Locke argued, however, that even Apache has a growing array of alternatives such as the Lighttpd Web server, the Apache FastCGI Web interface,  the Nginx proxy server and others.

But what undercuts the LAMP stack more than the advent of additional open source options is the emergence of cloud frameworks, Locke said.

Initially, cloud computing meant renting compute power on demand from the likes of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This meant renting a host virtual machine, programming the top layer, adding libraries and then when it was all done, managing the host and the virtual application, Locke said.

The problem with this model is that data centers are responsible for scaling the application up or down in response to changing volume requirements, he said. To solve this problem, Google, as well as Microsoft’s recently announced Azure platform, go beyond computing-on demand and manage the entire process with frameworks. All you do is write the application code (yes, you still need the P in LAMP), put it atop an application framework, and the framework will scale the application up and down as needed. No further involvement required. No LAMP stack required either.

Two successful examples of cloud frameworks are Salesforce.com and Facebook, he said.

The downside of frameworks, however, are loss of control and potential vendor lock-in, Locke said. The risk is less with Amazon EC2 since its controls are far more limited, he said. When writing an application for a specific vendor’s framework, however, a customer can lose portability because the provisioning and scaling mechanisms are behind-the-scenes and the source code and licensing are not necessarily readily available, he said.

The biggest challenge to LAMP as well as the Java and .NET stacks, therefore, is not the growth of additional choices but the cloud frameworks which may make all the stacks irrelevant. While handing over management and control is convenient, it also has its downside: you have to live by someone else’s rules, Locke said. Just  like a condo or regulated housing community, you’ve delegated the work, but you’ve also lost your freedom. Time will tell if you’ve made a good bet.

Recently, Red Hat Inc. has scooped up some impressive awards. Last Saturday, Matthew Szulik, the chairman of the Raleigh, N.C.-based company was named the Ernst & Young entrepreneur of the year and the Ernst & Young national winner in technology for growing the open source company into a successful business.

 In presenting the award, James S. Turley, the chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young said that “Szulik follows a proud tradition of pioneering entrepreneurs who overcame skeptics and brought a novel, seemingly improbable business idea to market successfully.”

 Joining Red Hat as president and CEO in 1998, five years after the company was founded, Szulik headed day-to-day operations during almost a decade of expansion. He was replaced as president and CEO nearly a year ago by Jim Whitehurst and now serves as chairman.

 Three days later after Szulik received his award, Red Hat itself was named public company of the year by the North Carolina Technology Association. The award was given on the basis of sustained company growth, solid operating results and stock price appreciation.

 In these turbulent times, accolades are hard to come by.