Open source software saves € 2 billion a year for the EU

The newly published report of the European Commission entitled “The Economic Contribution of Open Source Software to Innovation and the Competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Sector in the EU” ( version in pdf , 1.8 MB) states that using Open Sourse (in terms of the report: FLOSS - Free, Libre and Open Source Software ) in public and private structures of the EU saves the treasury of the member states up to a total of € 2 billion per year.

The authors of the report (scientists and businessmen from the Netherlands, Ireland, Spain, France and Italy) conducted a detailed analysis of how and in what amounts open source software is used in various organizations. Somewhere it completely replaced the proprietary software, somewhere two opposing seemingly ideologies get along well.

The study was conducted with concrete examples from life in six cities and provinces of European countries - from both old and new EU members. With noticeable differences in the depth of penetration of computers and, accordingly, in the attention paid to them by local authorities, several general trends are seen.
')
The cost of switching to free software, which was calculated by several parameters, mainly rests on the main one - the cost of retraining staff. This process always takes a lot of time, even if it is supposed to use both FLOSS and closed programs. In this regard, the head of the group of researchers, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh , insists on revising the programs of school and university education in the field of computer science. In his opinion, it is necessary to train students on an independent basis of specific brands and platforms.

Ayer Ghosh also called for taking donations in favor of the FLOSS developers to be charity and provide appropriate tax breaks for the sponsors, especially since such donations in the future will bring additional revenue to the treasury.

The report cites such figures on the financial effect of using open source software: the existing base of ready freely available code in Europe frees 131,000 "person-years" for organizations of programmers and designers, which is approximately € 800 million of savings; In addition, proprietary software manufacturers have opened their program code for about € 1.2 billion, which saved another 565,000 person-years.

The reaction to the report from the representatives of Initiative for Software Choice - an organization lobbying the interests of proprietary software developers - is still restrained, as they have not yet had time to study it in detail. However, already now, with a bit of irony, they notice that since the Open Source community has achieved such success, there is no need to introduce any other tax breaks for them.