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On Fri, 2007-09-21 at 18:50 +0100, Jonathan Roberts wrote: > ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf Wow! Some densely coded language but this conclusion on p12: Policy strategies focus mainly on correcting current policies and practices that implicitly or explicitly favour proprietary software: o Avoid penalising FLOSS in innovation and R&D incentives, public R&D funding and public software procurement that is currently often anti-competitive o Support FLOSS in pre-competitive research and standardisation o Avoid lifelong vendor lock-in in educational systems by teaching students skills, not specific applications; encourage participation in FLOSS-like communities o Encourage partnerships between large firms, SMEs and the FLOSS community o Provide equitable tax treatment for FLOSS creators: FLOSS software contributions can be treated as charitable donations for tax purposes. Where this is already possible, spread awareness among firms, contributors and authorities. o Explore how unbundling between hardware and software can lead to a more competitive market and ease forms of innovation that are not favoured by vertical integration. For Small and Medium Enterprises and FLOSS see sections 7.5.2-5. Does the Extramadura/Andalucia model apply to Cornwall and Devon??????? Can we replicate that success here? I found these interesting: (I am sure each of us would pick differently!) extracts from the huge document. p49 It should be emphasised that the quantity of publicly distributed FLOSS code (as measured by source lines of code, or SLOC) is doubling every 18 to 24 months. This has been a finding of our study on the Debian collection over an 8-year period, and is consistent with the evolution of other FLOSS software collections (such as for Java-based FLOSS code). Of course, this means that during the last 18-24 months as much FLOSS software code was created as in the entire previous history of FLOSS development. (net code) p64 shows a sad statistic in the years 1950-85, 16% of contributors to FLOSS were under 16, in 2002 zero; 16-18 yrs dropped from 27% to 8%. Our schools need to know this. p66 The survey showed that developers believe that the skills they learn through FLOSS communities can compensate for a lack of a formal degree (see Figure 33). Employers believe a number of skills are learnt better in the “learn-by-doing” methods of participation in FLOSS communities than in formal courses (see Figure 32) – unsurprisingly developers are even more positive than employers about this. Furthermore, 55% of employers say that employees with proven FLOSS development experience would be paid as much as employees with a formal degree and 13% even say they would pay employees with FLOSS development experience more than those with a formal degree. p83 The UK and Swiss firms were able to work together to implement a solution for BIOMED, a global database of thousands of medical images, and the national Orixo members are closely collaborating with the national TV/media organisations (BBC in the UK and RAI in Italy) to build FLOSS-based solutions for reliable broadband and mobile media content servers. This model allows each small firm to profit from its expertise for custom solutions, while drawing on a large base of pre-written software under FLOSS licences, and draw in addition on a large community of hundreds of individual developers spread around the world, including volunteers but also other similar small companies. Needless to say, skills levels in these niche firms are very high, with proportionately high salary levels and profits and potential for network-based employment generation on a large scale. So, how come the BBC didn't do this for its recent controversial innovation? I was sure there must be a FLOSS solution - ditto the NHS system. Whilst I skipped a lot I found I learned a lot and appreciated the depth and extent of the work that is done in Europe on recognising and using FLOSS and understanding its value and significance to us all. I commend p180 section 9.2 SWOT analysis p201 section 9.3 on the 3 scenarios related to freedom to use FLOSS p205 section 9.5.1 on interoperability and p216 Section 9.5.5 on Education in IT (schools) Thanks Jon -- James Kilty http://www.kilty.demon.co.uk -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html