European Commission Study Boosts Open Source

January 17th, 2007: The European Commission (EC) has given the world of open source an enormous publicity boost after revealing the results of a new report into the effect of open source in the business world.

Conducted by academics at the United Nations University in Maastricht, Netherlands, and commissioned by the EC, the report analysed open source projects (OSS) in six European Union countries, and found that overall the technology and its communities are thriving.

The equivalent of 131,000 "person years" have been donated to OSS projects, while code with an estimated worth of €1.2 billion (the cost of employing 565,000 software developers per year) has been donated to the community by businesses.

The commission suggests that European lawmakers should rethink policies that favour the use of proprietary software after the report found that not only are savings made through the use of open source software in almost all cases, but also that it is worth around €2 billion (AUD$3.3 billion) a year to the European economy.

Removing any educational focus on proprietary software is also recommended by the report, which states that vendor neutrality should be encouraged by teaching skills not software and encouraging participation in open source development.

When it comes to using free software, the report also found that there was no difference in worker productivity when using OpenOffice.org compared to proprietary products.

"Open Office has all the functionalities that public offices need to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations," reads the report. "Open Office is free and extremely stable."

It’s not all sunshine though, as the report did find that employees may feel less valuable if they have to work with free software and that raining costs could be higher in the short term for those migrating to OSS.

These two issues, however, could become less of an issue in the future as open source software further permeates the market and people adjust their workflows accordingly.

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