BSA Study Demonstrates Open Source's Economic Advantage

jrepin writes "The fundamental premise of the latest Software Alliance study — that licensed, proprietary software is better in many ways than pirated copies — actually applies to open source software even more strongly, with the added virtues that the software is free to try, to use and to modify. That means the potential economic impact of free software is also even greater than that offered by both licensed and unlicensed proprietary software. It's yet another reason for governments around the world to promote the use of open source in their countries by everyone at every level."

Comments

Re:Post Facto Economic Impact -- Not Productivity

[icebike]

not too many would continue forking out cash for MS Office if there are alternatives like Google Office (the LO or OO offices are certainly not ready for most office usage, although they're probably adequate for personal use).

[citation needed]

The number of companies what have switched entirely to LO and/or OO while continuing to run Windows is astounding. Its more than good enough to handle "most office usage". I know of entire companies that switched cold turkey, with servers full of MS Word/Excel documents. They had a problem with less than 50 documents out of hundreds of thousands dating back 20 years. Those that failed were old and broken MS Office spread sheets, which turned out to be broken in Excel as well.

LO gets document conversion correct far more often than Google Office.

The phrase "Certainly not ready" suggests your analysis is done to the same standards as the BSA.

Re:In short support following the rules.

[icebike]

Anything that speeds the demise of companies like Adobe, MS, Sony, Oracle & EA

Some people misbehave. So lets condemn all people.

There is simply not enough demand for some specialized software to support development a free software approach. Somebody has to feed, clothe and shelter the guy(s) taking 6 months of their lives to write, debug and test the code for your new air-stream continuous sample monitoring gizmo (or whatever).

Re:Post Facto Economic Impact -- Not Productivity

[icebike]

Surely you can name just half a dozen companies whose user base comprises more than, say 200 people, that have switched entirely, then?

I mean, since you're so keen on citations, right?

For the Google challenged:
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments

Re:It's about liability and responsibility of faul

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

So Can I....

http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industry/government/certifications.html