In a piece of Wired.com the self-proclaimed 'hater of all free' Author Andrew Keen says that the economic downturn will pop open-source. It seems that Andrew has quite a short memory and even if the problem with the economy seems to be much worse that when the Internet bubble burst we had such a crisis back in 2001 to 2003. Even though I lost my job in the fall of 2002 I started to work for an open-source project called: JBoss. Today I still profit from the work and money I put into this endeavor.
Of course the economic downturn with have some implication onto the open-source but maybe not in such simple turn as Andrew thinks. But even if developers of open-source projects are laid of their chances to get another job is much better than for the people that just had a nice-to-five job. That in turn means that open-source will not falter because of a max exodus of their developers. On the other hand companies need to save even more meaning that they are considering open-source more and more making the open-source business model even more successful.
I would predict that the open-source movement will become stronger despite or maybe even because of the economic crises.
Have fun - Andy