MASTERTHEBOSS.COM

2009 Seems a promising year for Open source software : OSS eliminates up-front licensing costs and drives down the total costs of new projects especially in start-up phase. Moving from up-front capital costs to these pay-as-you-go services will also let executive teams resize their technology budgets to adapt to current economic conditions, or to changing revenue streams.

Oracle's acquisition of BEA Systems made it one of the largest players in the Java application server market. But it's still too early to say how BEA customers have weathered the transition. Some might not appreciate their contracts being subsumed into Larry Ellison's software juggernaut.
On the other hand, the Red Hat/JBoss merger has proven to be a comfortable match for most JBoss customers, the majority of whom were Linux users to begin with.

As more companies seek innovative solutions that do more with less, they will follow OSS adoption will accelerate across the full infrastructure software stack and into applications, on the other hand when customers aren't buying, tool vendors don't innovate -- so don't expect many groundbreaking new technologies to debut this year.

Ultimately, economic conditions will play a huge role in how 2009 pans out for the developer community: however smart companies will realize that process automation is one of the best ways to reduce costs in any business. Now may actually be the ideal time to revisit old software schemes that got shelved back when staffing budgets were flush.

References:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/fatalexception/archives/2009/01/software_develo.html
http://linux.sys-con.com/node/797241