Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols bills himself the “Cyber Cynic.” Sounds good by us – our wife has been known to toss the epithet “cynic” in our direction from time to time.

 

In fact, she got fed up with our relentless negativity expressed towards the television during the Vancouver Winter Olympics’ tediously boring open ceremonies until she agreed that, yes, except for k.d. lang’s utterly incandescent “Hallelujah,” they did bite pretty hard.

 

All to say we’re open to what Vaughan-Nichols might have to say, and he finds OpenLogic, an open-source software support company, “interesting,” on “both their growth and what programs businesses are asking for help with.”

 

Point one: “OpenLogic is continuing to grow while many other businesses are stuck in the bad economic times. According to the company, new customer growth was strong as bookings increased 86 percent over 2008 ... [while] renewal bookings grew by 40 percent over 2008.

 

Earlier this year TMC’s (News - Alert) Shamila Janakiraman reported that credativ, an open source service and support company, announced a partnership with OpenLogic. “Both the companies plan to offer credativ’s on-depth third level support to OpenLogic’s customers across Europe and North America,” she wrote.

 

“I don’t know about you, but I’m impressed,” Vaughan-Nichols writes. “In 2009, OpenLogic actually saw significant growth. About the only other companies that come to mind that saw a serious increase in business last year was Apple and Red Hat (News - Alert).”

 

JBoss, Tomcat, Apache Web Server, Hibernate and MySQL Database Server were the top five, which he found “fascinating… because, if you think about it, they tell you what companies are doing with open source: They’re developing Java Server-based Web applications with MySQL as their database back-end.”

 

MySQL, now owned by Oracle (News - Alert), is “arguably the best open-source database management system,” Vaughan-Nichols commented, adding that “if you add it all together, you see companies moving forward with open-source-based, dynamic Web-based applications. Many of programs being created with these components won’t be available to the public. Instead, they’re meant for internal company use.”

 

In short, he says, “this trend represents open source continuing to become a core part of IT’s infrastructure.”