Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 16th Jan 2007 23:53 UTC, submitted by Hans Kwint
The European Commission's enterprise and industry department just released the final draft [.pdf] of what could be the biggest academic interdisciplinary study on the economic/innovative impacts of FLOSS. The study was done by an international consortium, led by the United Nations University/University of Maastricht's department of innovation; UNU-MERIT for short. The study was prepared by senior researcher Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, who did a tremendous amount of FLOSS studies the last few years, amongst them on FLOSSpols and FLOSSWorld.
Thread beginning with comment 202465
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-07-06
"Policy strategies focus mainly on correcting current policies and practices that implicitly or explicitly favour proprietary software:
o Avoid penalising FLOSS in innovation and R&D incentives, public R&D funding and public software procurement that is currently often anti-competitive
o Support FLOSS in pre-competitive research and standardisation
o Avoid lifelong vendor lock-in in educational systems by teaching students skills, not specific applications; encourage participation in FLOSS-like communities
o Encourage partnerships between large firms, SMEs and the FLOSS community
o Provide equitable tax treatment for FLOSS creators: FLOSS software contributions can be treated as charitable donations for tax purposes. Where this is already possible, spread awareness among firms, contributors and authorities.
o Explore how unbundling between hardware and software can lead to a more competitive market and ease forms of innovation that are not favoured by vertical integration."
I really hope that the EU commission will implement these policies. I'm not so confident, however.