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Large FLOSS Study Gets the Real Facts
Hans Kwint writes "The European Commission's enterprise and industry department has just released the final draft of what could be the biggest academic interdisciplinary study on the economic / innovative impacts of free/libre/open source software (1.8-MB PDF). The study was done by an international consortium led by the United Nations University / University of Maastricht. The lead researcher, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, has overseen a large volume of FLOSS studies in the last few years, including ones on FLOSS policies and worldwide FLOSS adoption. This academic-grade study has a very broad scope and has collected real-world information that is valuable for both companies and government bodies thinking about migration. The study is about the economic impact of FLOSS, not excluding the hidden indirect impact. It compares scenarios of open and proprietary software futures of Europe. The study looks at the FLOSS's competitiveness compared to proprietary software and also provides a few TCO comparison case-studies.
I've never seen such a thorough and methodical compilation of real-world evidence in favour of F[L]OSS.
However, the 'proprietary vs FLOSS' debate is a battle which each day seems to more resemble the 'biblical literalism versus evolution' debate. Just like the biblical literalists who hang on to their denials of evolution, despite the evidence, there'll be those who'll never be convinced about the benefits of FLOSS, and will always be there as suckers to sustain the likes of Microsoft.
Kinda puts an ironic twist on the old adage: "To those who believe, no proof is necessary. To those who disbelieve, no proof is possible."
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Actually, I think the Netherlands are funding a national group which is working on the Dutch spellchecker and thesaurus for OpenOffice. They are funding the work that programmers don't do, that's why you're not seeing it.
As for the need for studies; I'm thankful they are researching before making decissions.
You seem to assume OSS is always better and think a government should assume the same. What studies like these show is parameters for when moving to OSS is a good idea.
There are already pretty large scale OSS migrations in the EU, so they are actually using OSS. I wouldn't be surprised if non-development related use of OSS is far greater in governments than in corporations at the moment.
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Thank you for making these points! I've had to use MSO with VBA for years due to in-house automation requirements (joy), and while the language isn't exactly fun :\, the DOMs and application APIs are immediately discoverable thanks to 1) generally extensive and useful documentation, and 2) autocomplete. So I can get something simple up and running usually inside of an hour.
Meanwhile, in OOo land, I've spent hours simply trying to dig through the documentation to figure out the hierarchy of objects and APIs for one frigging object. Who the hell wrote the API docs? I'm not familiar with Java, but the docs seem very Java-oriented -- is that terrible disconnected API soup a Java thing? I'm baffled. And frustrated enough (by other things as well*) that I've been unable to seriously recommend OOo.
* Lousy Asian-language support makes OOo a non-starter in my field of Japanese translation. It's galling, because OOo is sooo close to being a good idea, yet falls painfully far from the mark. <sigh.>
"OpenOffice.org -- it's almost a Good Idea!" TM
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."