But resulting IT staff layoffs during economic downtimes means fewer people are able to start an incremental project, he said. MySQL's Zack Urlocker, vice president of products, countered that project teams without a budget will just find open-source software to get their projects going. "Sometimes the CIOs or CEOs just aren't even aware of it," he said.

Belt-tightening will be good for innovation and particularly for open source, said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu. "I think the absence of money is the biggest spur to innovation than the presence of money," he said.

Open-source attributes were pointed out, such as lower acquisition and maintenance costs, freedom from vendor lock-in, and access to community developed customizations. The use of open source is becoming a first option, according to Shuttleworth. "I think we're pretty close to the point where proprietary software has to be justified instead of the other way around," he said.

During an introduction to the conference, Matt Asay, vice president of development at Alfresco, pointed out that roughly US$2 billion has been invested in open-source software since 2000 and in one year, it has all been given back through acquisitions like Sun's $1 billion acquisition of MySQL.

Open source has moved beyond CRM and content management systems, Assay said. "Can open source innovate? I think the answer is demonstrably yes," he said.

At another panel session the future of the operating system, Google's computing model, in which everything is hosted on the Internet and accessed via a thin-client browser, was questioned by an Intel official

"The Google model really scares me," said Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux and open-source technologist at Intel. The model gives a third party control of data, which cannot be accessed on an airplane, he noted.

Sun's James Hughes, chief technologist for Solaris, said very large companies are looking at outsourcing their applications to Google but he has not seen it actually happen. "I don't see anybody doing it, but maybe they will," he said.

Hughes also pointed out differences between Solaris and Linux, which are vying in the open source OS space. "There's than one OS out there, and if Solaris strives to be Linux, why bother," Hughes said. Solaris is differentiated by features like DTrace, for dynamic tracing, he said.

"In general, I don't see it as Unix versus Linux versus whatever. We've gone to a model of open source," Hughes said. Solaris, though, has had a challenge because it underwent 20 years of closed-source development before going the open-source route, he said.