zsombor's lair

An EU study on Free/Libre/Open Source Software while not necessarily reflecting the views of the European Commission does have some interesting findings:

Proprietary packaged software firms account for well below 10% of employment of software developers in the U.S., and “IT user” firms account for over 70% of software developers employed with a similar salary (and thus skill) level. This suggests a relatively low potential for cannibalisation of proprietary software jobs by FLOSS, and suggests a relatively high potential for software developer jobs to become increasingly FLOSS- related. FLOSS and proprietary software show a ratio of 30:70 (overlapping) in recent job postings indicating significant demand for FLOSS-related skills.

So much for “eating our lunch” myth.

FLOSS potentially saves industry over 36% in software R&D investment that can result in increased profits or be more usefully spent in further innovation.

Observe the “imitation instead of innovation” myth sinking.

Firms have invested an estimated Euro 1.2 billion in developing FLOSS software that is made freely available. Such firms represent in total at least 565 000 jobs and Euro 263 billion in annual revenue. Contributing firms are from several non-IT (but often ICT intensive) sectors, and tend to have much higher revenues than non-contributing firms.

Makes you think about the “sharing destroys competitive advantage” myth.

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.

Tomorrow it will be even tougher to ignore than today.