Open Source Blog

Europe's great open source opportunity
January 15, 2007

As mentioned on Friday, the European Commission's final report on the the Economic Impact of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) contains some interesting insight into European adoption of open source and its "opportunity to create new software businesses and reach towards the Lisbon goals of making Europe the most competitive knowledge economy by 2010."

It also takes me back to an old argument about the importance of location to open source vendors.

As can be seen from this news story, the study indicated that the increased use of free and open source software in Europe could increase the region's competitiveness with the US.

It also contains some statistics as evidence of the opportunity at hand.

"According to the results of surveys carried out by UNU-MERIT, a joint research and training centre of United Nations University and Maastricht University, 63% of all FLOSS developers are resident in the European Union, with 20% in the US and Canada.

Additionally, Sourceforge figures collected by MERIT indicate that 42% of Sourceforge users are based in Europe, compared with 39% in North America, 7% Asia and 4% Latin America.

Drilling deeper, the study found that the US and Canada is slightly ahead of Europe in terms of developers registered with Sourceforge projects, but that in terms of the number who actually make changes to the code, (roughly 50,000 committers compared to 1.1 million registered developers) Europe has a lead on the US and Canada.

When it comes to Sourceforge project maintainers, some 48% are based in Europe, compared to 30% in the US and Canada. Meanwhile, a study of the mailing lists for FreeBSD, Gnome and Debian indicated that 45% of participants are in the EU, and 27% in the US and Canada."

It's all looking good, but as noted:

"If Europe is to make the most of its open source developers it will have to ensure that it can keep them, however. Of the open source developers surveyed that do not reside in their country of nationality, 5% had left the US, while 26% had moved to the US."

Which takes us back to the heady days of summer 2006 and Matt Asay's claim that European companies should avoid relocating to the US.

That sparked some interesting debate as well as (of all things) a pointless Web 2.0 style mash-up.

All in all, I think we rather lost sight of what it was Matt was saying. Back to his original statement:

"I think Europe needs to reassert itself as the business center for Europe," he said, noting that enterprise open source software vendors are in a position to do so, but only if they stop moving to North America. "They need to stop moving to Silicon Valley," he said. "There are no customers in Silicon Valley, only vendors."

IT appears that the EC study agrees with him, and not only that, it also explains how those that remain in Europe could be set to benefit from doing so.

"A growth and innovation simulation model shows that increasing the FLOSS share of software investment from 20% to 40% would lead to a 0.1% increase in annual EU GDP growth excluding benefits within the ICT industry itself -- over Euro 10 billion annually."