Open Source Software in Europe

A new report on the "Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU" was published in the European Commission's website. Thanks to Paulo Vilela for summing it up (article in Portuguese):

Conclusions

• The existent FLOSS base would cost 12.000 milions of Euro to be commercialy developed, with contributions of at least 131.000 people/year
• FLOSS Services can reach 32% of the IT services by 2010
• Free Software can reduce 26% on R&D investiment on the software industry, allowing bigger profits or more investigation resourses
• Europe leads the participation on FLOSS
• FLOSS can encourage new jobs and SMEs by creating the needed environment for development of knowledge and retencion of more value. Historicly Europe is less capable of creating new businesses than the United States, but the bigger number of Free Software contributors gives it the chance of creating new software companies and getting closer to the milestones on Lisbon Strategy of making Europe the most competitive knowledge economy.

Recommendations

• Stop penalty FLOSS on innovation and R&D
  
• Support FLOSS on pre-competitive models and on normalization
• Stop vendor lock-in in educational systems by teaching functionalities and not specific applications; encourage the participation in commuties like FLOSS ones
• Encourage partnerships between companies and FLOSS communities
  
• Deal with contributions to Open Source as donations to social institutions (this seems awkward to me...)
  
• Explore ways of decoupling hardware and software to create a more competitve market, and make easier the kind of inovation that isn't allowed with the vertical integration model