Many Open source entities had an eventful, breakthrough year in 2008. Not all the events were positive, in fact most of them weren’t. Once hacker’s, malware producer’s target was windows but in 2008 we have seen their shift of focus towards open source projects. Without any arguments, the biggest protection against security holes is always keeping up-to-date your software/application. But here is the hiccup; most open source lacks frequent update unlike property software/applications. So no matter how wonderful and creative open source projects are you can’t blame the corporate user’s going after property software/application to keep their pants on.

Of course there are exceptions like-Firefox, MySQL (supported by Sun Microsystems), PHP, WordPress (Supported by automatic), Open Office, Fedora, Ubuntu, Android (Supported by Google) etc. More or less these and few other open source projects get frequent security updates than others. Every Open Source got a passionate community behind it, some are huge some are nominal. Nonetheless you cannot blame the whole community that much if it’s lacks frequent security patches, rather the guys on the helm to make management and operation decision are the responsible ones.

The argument that “Open source lacks proper/viable business model” shouldn’t be the primary concern for its growth in enterprise/corporate arena. The biggest challenge ahead is a proper model for supporting updates.

In 2009 obviously the economic gloom will force businesses to make structural changes to their IT strategies to drive down costs. Open source software eliminates up-front licensing costs and drives down the total costs of new projects. This presents a great opportunity for the open source projects to enter into corporate arena. Question is how many projects will be able to put their things together and provide a viable model of frequent updates. Next thing to worry about is the business model. We’ll likely to see a lot more open source projects acquired by property software companies this 2009, as well as mergers between different open source projects.

2009 might be the year of Open source, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing. It will be interesting year to follow these development closely.