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.
The pdf of the final draft runs to 287 pages. For those who don’t fancy wading through it, this is how the authors describe their key findings:
“FLOSS applications are first, second or third-rung products in terms of market share in several markets, including web servers, server operating systems, desktop operating systems, web browsers, databases, e-mail and other ICT infrastructure systems. FLOSS market share for operating systems and desktops is higher in Europe than in the US, followed by Asia. These market shares have seen considerable growth in the past five years.
“FLOSS market penetration is also high – a large share of private and public organisations report some use of FLOSS in most application domains. In the public sector, Europe has particularly high penetration, perhaps soon to be overtaken by Asia and Latin America. In the private sector, FLOSS adoption is driven by medium- and large-sized firms.
“Almost two-thirds of FLOSS software is still written by individuals; firms contribute about 15% and other institutions another 20%.
“Europe is the leading region in terms of globally collaborating FLOSS software developers, and leads in terms of global project leaders, followed closely by North America (interestingly, more in the East Coast than the West). Asia and Latin America face disadvantages at least partly due to language barriers, but may have an increasing share of developers active in local communities.
“Weighted by regional PC penetration, central Europe and Scandinavia provide disproportionately high numbers of developers; weighted by average income, India is the leading provider of FLOSS developers by far, followed by China.
“While the US has the edge in terms of large FLOSS-related businesses, the greater individual contribution from Europe has led to an increasing number of globally successful European FLOSS SMEs.”
A flick through the early pages suggests this is an interesting report. For example, here something on the economic impact of FLOSS
“The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally. This code base has been doubling every 18-24 months over the past eight years, and this growth is projected to continue for several more years.”
This is big stuff. No wonder the old proprietary outfits are sweating.
This is big stuff. No wonder the old proprietary outfits are sweating.
Um, one of the conclusions was that FLOSS had a low chance of “canibalizing proprietary software jobs.”
The study says that FLOSS’ economic impact is in addition to proprietary software development, not instead of.
well, I would put it like this:
If you are a closed source business you better try to scratch any itch your customers might come up with, unless you want to risk that one of your customers starts to scratch his itch using an open source approach.
Because as soon as this happens you have a competitor which you can under no circumstances undercut with a license price deal, and that leaves you only one option: Be technically better than the open source competitor at all times.
And even if you manage to do this (like MS seems to have done mostly for MS Office), there is one time in the future, where the open source application will be “good enough” for most of the market.
So I would conclude that FLOSS does not cannibalize proprietary software jobs in Europe, because we do not have many Software companies in Europe which make general purpose software which is likely to be reprogrammed by open source projects. And niche software companies do not face that large a threat by FLOSS, because not enough people have to scratch an itch.
“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.
Indeed, more and more people and institutions are realizing the benefits of open-source software. Although everything, everywhere open-source belongs to an utopia, I believe that by the end of this decade we will see open-source become a major competitor in software and the philosophy will expand even more to other domains outside the IT world.
We can only win with this – as many of you know, competition drives inovation and with it we can benefit a lot. Seeing this kind of studies appear only show that there is a desire to change.
Another Joe’s and Jane’s invisible repression will eventually unveil and disappear.
Edited 2007-01-17 00:43
I bet 5 bucks this article won’t make it to the “Get the Facts” page on Microsoft’s site. 😀
It’s times like this I miss NotParker. Watching him try and discredit this report would be quite amusing…
im afraid he does not have time for that anymore, after microsoft got hints of his superior ability to convey the facts, they made him first advisor to the GetTheFacts division at microsoft hq.
Nice one! 🙂
I have to say I miss NotParker myself. The dude really was a barrel of laughs especially how he seemed to take every pro(insert *nix flavor here) article as a direct attack on MS and therefore, by proxy, himself.
Did the guy really get suspended or is he actually band?
oops. wrong thread. never mind.
Edited 2007-01-17 02:09
It’s still funny in this one.
It’s superFLOSS!
(available at your local dentist or geek)