CEO Jim Whitehurst says Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) will perform robustly through a recession. Is that true or is he engaged in wishful thinking? Information Week's cover story this week, "The Open Source Enterprise," concludes that open source code gets taken more seriously in a time of IT budget cutbacks. Will that help Red Hat?

My editor, Chris Murphy, has pointed out that Red Hat revenues actually declined from $80.8 million in 2001 to $78.9 million in 2002, then recovered to $90.9 million in 2003 and $124.7 million in 2004, even though those years were still part of a slow and painful recovery for the technology industry.

In other words, if the recession is severe enough, even open source company revenues decline, at least momentarily. After a decline in 2002, Red Hat's showed remarkable resilience. Whitehurst's prediction seems largely borne out by recent experience.

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Red Hat is leveraging Microsoft’s oldest secret to success: Before you pursue customers, you need to evangelize your products and development tools to ISVs (independent software vendors). That strategy created platform demand for Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle’s database, and so on.

Now, Red Hat seems to be repeating that success in the open source middleware market.

Red Hat Finds 250 Ways to Push Beyond Linux