Economy and Open Source Software
A study has been prepared for the European Commission on the “Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU.”
It turns out that shared software (open source or as referred to in the study: FLOSS – Free/Libre/Open Source Software) has a huge positive impact on the whole economy in many different ways. Starting from generating programming and communication skills for the participating developers to an amount of EUR 12 billion in monetary value that comes from the existing code base which is doubling in size every 18-24 months! Using open source software potentially saves the industry over 36% in R&D investment that can result in increased profits or be spent in other areas of innovation.
Coming back to the EU's Lisbon goals of making Europe the most competitive knowledge economy by 2010 open source software can contribute to provide a skills development environment valued by employers and retaining a greater share of value add locally (the study shows that the EU is significantly loosing talent in science and engineering to the US). This environment combined with the comparatively higher share of open source developers in Europe could encourage the creation of new software businesses which is limited here compared to the US due to restricted venture capital and risk tolerance.
Concrete statement: “Increased use of open source software may provide a way for Europe to compensate for a low GDP share of ICT investment relative to the US. A growth and innovation simulation model shows that increasing the open source software share of software investment from 20% to 40% would lead to a 0.1% increase in annual EU GDP growth excluding benefits within the ICT industry itself – i.e. over Euro 10 billion annually.”
And just a modest note on Sun: the study made proof that we are the No. 1 contributor (by far) to the open source community. Not sure how many times open office is mentioned in the study but you'll read it very frequently going through...
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07:34AM Jan 19, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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Posted by Alpa on March 16, 2007 at 08:53 AM CET #