Will the EU Adopt FLOSS to Better Compete Against the U.S.?

by Braden Cox on February 16, 2007 · 2 comments

Here’s another installment of my analysis of the voluminous Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) report issued by the European Commission. In my last blog post, I discussed how the EC’s report is a call to action for Europe’s policymakers. The ambitious proposals in the report aim to do for Europe’s ICT industry what the Airbus project did for Europe’s aeronautics industry.
This realization makes the report less about open source software, and more about industrial policy (not necessarily in a bad way).

If you’re going to have industrial policy, however, you need the industry. In Section 6–FLOSS Role in the Economy: Market Share and Geography–the authors argue that Europe has both parts of a successful FLOSS industry equation: developers and users. This section is not a “build it and they will come” proposition; rather, the authors proclaim to policymakers “build FLOSS apps because FLOSS developers are already here.”