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.

Comments

Re:But will it change people's religion?

[paniq]

I don't think you can compare a discussion about whether to use FLOSS or not with whether to believe in "intelligent design" or not.

Unlike with the Open Source issue, believing in evolution or not does not matter. No matter what you believe how the world was born, this will not change the past, and it will certainly have no influence on the way you work.

The benefits of Open Source are nothing you can discuss about once the research has been done. And so far we are only talking about those objective business figures. The whole subjective part of it has only been covered in a handful of books, Eric S. Raymonds "Cathedral and Bazaar" being one of it.

Now this is entirely subjective, and needs to be backed up by objective research, but I'm confident I'm not the only one:

I am 26. I started programming when I was 9. For 15 years, I was exclusively using non-free products. Since I switched to working with open source products 2 years ago, my productivity has boasted. I have more work-related contacts than ever. I participate in various projects. I learn so much every day - about programming, and especially about working with other people. Because of those contacts, I get inside scoops and information that in non-free terms would be regarded as "classified". I feel that I shape myself into someone who will be able to do quite good consulting one day. I can safely say that my knowledge has never grown this fast.

Now show me anyone who can claim the opposite: "I used free software for 15 years, now I switched to non-free software, boy my productivity sky-rocketed! And I know so many people now!" - in fact, try to twist arguments and see if the shoe still fits. I can not see free software going away, and I can not see longtime users migrating back to Windows.

This is not a question of religion. This is a question of performance and optimal work flow.

Document Properties

[OhneWorte]

Well, if you look at the document properties what do you find? It was created with PScript.dll under Windows.
I hope they have learned their lesson from their study themselves... :-/

Ohne Worte

Re:Well?

[ThePhilips]

To be honest, when I first saw the line, I also wanted to make similar post.

But then - just before hitting "Reply to This" - I recalled all the nightmares of supporting M$Office documents my company have had in past. All the bugs and regressions of OO.o cannot cover experience with M$Office in networked environment.

Our favorite biggest sucker is M$O document with global system architecture spec: opening from network drive of the 20 page (about 200k thanks to diagrams) document takes 2 to 5 minutes. Always. Nobody knows what M$Word does - but it basicly hangs and then later happily pop-ups from background with open document reporting neither error nor warning. Copy the document from networked repository to local harddrive - and it opens instantly. Open it as it is supposed to be open - and locked - on servers and ... here we go. (Actually we also have several document which take ages to open regardless of where from you open them: locally or remotely. But it just everybody has to work with sys arch spec often - so it is major P.I.T.A.)

OO.o is bloated, ugly, slow, feature-poor, buggy and inconsistent. Its macro language is total and utter undocumented crap (N.B. I hate VBA - no language could be worse. Or so I thought. Before I have seen StarBasic (or whatever that thing is called)). BUT. In three years of deployment we found no single major blocker, which prevented us from using OO.o internally.