This one’s going to take a while to completely absorb, but I’d highly recommend that everyone check out the new, enormous (287 pages!) and wide-ranging study of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). The report, financed by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry, was written by Rishab Ayer Gosh and an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers. Based on this report, The European Commission has issued an endorsement of open-source software. CNet’s got the news on the report. Here’s the PDF of the document, also attached below.
The Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU exhaustively documents the way that Free/Open technologies dominate information technology and describes who actually writes Free/Open software. It also talks about what it would cost to replicate the benefits of Free/Open software through proprietary development (EU12 billion!), how many person years that would take (131,000!), and projects the total size of the Free/Open market in the years to come.
This is the most authoritative study on Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) that I’ve seen to date. If you know of others, please post them to the comments.
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