The European Commission (DG Enterprise and Industry, I suppose) has made available a comprehensive report on the significance of free/libre and open source (FLOSS) applications for economic and innovation development. The report is titled “Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU” and the principle author is Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, founder of the online journal, FirstMonday, and a prolific researcher on FLOSS.
The report is HUGE, nearly 300 pages, and, as I mentioned, quite comprehensive. I actually wonder whether it would have made sense to divvy it up but a case can also be made for presenting it in one piece.
What’s most interesting to me is Ghosh’s focus on FLOSS communities as learning communities and their significance for development. He’s done a lot of work in this area in the past. See especially pg. 171, in the conclusions to chapter 8.5, Modeling the economic impact of FLOSS on innovation and growth. There the authors say (take a deep breath, looong sentence),
“Our results are suggestive of the overriding importance of human capital formation in this set-up, and especially the way in which FLOSS can directly and positively influence the speed at which contributors to FLOSS communities can pick-up new knowledge and put that to good learning use, for themselves but also for the more down to earth users of FLOSS software, certainly if the latter would be geared at the design of free access ICT-based learning environments.”
Same thing I was trying to get across here, where I do indeed refer to Ghosh’s past work. Not as sophisticated as in this new report, but we’re thinking along the same lines.
