Opensource load testing tool. Is it possible?

Whenever I think of software industry, instantly one thing comes into my mind and i.e. ‘Open source community’. Opensource software plays a major role in tech world. And now a days-another hot topic talked about is software testing and quality.

But when I think of these two areas-opensource and testing, I don’t see much collaboration between them. Yes, there do exist some great code analysers; unit testing frameworks like junit, httpunit, tagunit and they are used widely all over the world. Also there is a tool called Jmeter from apache for load and performance testing. 
Then there are some great and widely used tools from Mercury Interactive, Rational, Segue and all. Quicktest Pro, Loadrunner, Rational Robot and all. Big organisations use these tools. These tools play a major role in entire testing life cycle. But when it comes to small and medium sized organisations, they really can’t afford to buy these tools.
The main thing is the open source tools available today does not serve the purpose from business point of view. But actually in testing phase one has to rely upon the tools available by mercury, rational and all. These tools are not only costly but from usability point of view they are very powerful. Every other tool supports many databases, application servers, different environments and operating systems. Let’s take an example of load testing. Load testing is a very critical area. A lot of expertise as well as the powerful tool are required for making it a success. So when we see Loadrunner, no other open source tool matches its features, power. One can thoroughly analyse the test results. Where the problem is? Why the page is taking too much time to load? The other most important part is the support provided by the vendors.
One has to buy a licensed copy of these testing tools then a company can have support, training from the vendor. And its also a need of small companies now a days to carry out all kinds of testing required before delivering it to the customer.
And here opensource comes into picture. I hardly know any open source-testing tool, which can compete with products from big testing tool vendors. Loadrunner, quicktest pro- the tools developed by open source community parallel to these is a need of an hour. Then only automated testing, load-performance testing, functional automation testing can evolve. Currently, it’s just limited to big brothers. The open source tools just should not be developed but they should as good as the other ones. So that companies can entirely rely upon them.
But this can happen in reality when the people involved in software testing as a community discuss these issues or take steps in understanding the real need. Getting involved with communities like apache will help a lot. Java is an excellent of example. We see lot of being developed invented in Java by open source community. And many of these products, tools, utilities, frameworks are recognised and used.