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General
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Written by Daniel
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Monday, 15 January 2007 08:11 |
Open source is good for the economy: report
Worth €2bn a year
By Lucy Sherriff
Published Monday 15th January 2007 15:36 GMT
The Register!
Europe's lawmakers should "correct" policies that "implicitly or explicitly" favour the use of proprietary software, according to a newly published report from the European Commission (EC).
The EC commissioned Netherlands based UNU-MERIT to investigate the "economic impact of "FLOSS"* in Europe". The researchers found open source software is worth around €2bn every year to the European economy.
The technology is also flourishing, with a "large share" of both private and public enterprises reporting some use of OSS.
The researchers found that the existing code base of OSS in Europe is worth the equivalent of 131,000 freely donated "person years" of time from individual developers. Annually, this is worth around €800m to the European economy, according to lead author Rishab Aiyer Ghosh.
In the form of code that has been made freely available, businesses have contributed a further €1.2bn worth of software, the equivalent of employing 565,000 software developers annually... Much more!
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