European Commission Report Quantifies Open Source Benefits to European Economy
A report funded by the European Commission has concluded European businesses and governments would be wise to increase their knowledge of and usage of open source software. A nice article from the BBC News is available here. For the full report, click here.
A few key highlights from the report were:
1. open source software is 1st, 2nd or 3rd in many market segments, including web servers, server operating systems, desktop operating systems, web browsers, database, and e-mail.
2. europe embraces open source more than the US, at least in operating systems.
3. almost 2/3 of open source software is still written by individuals
4. the existing base of open source applications would cost firms almost 12B euros to reproduce internally. this code base has been doubling every 18-24 months over the past 8 years.
5. proprietary software firms account for less than 10% of all employment of software developers while “IT user” firms account for over 70%, suggesting a relatively low potential for “cannibalization” of software jobs by the open source movement.
-dave
Dave,
I’m coming perilously close to removing your blog from my RSS feed. We haven’t heard from you in over a month…which is a shame given your interesting posts of the past.
Don
02/15/07 10:30 AM at 10:30 am