http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf
This time from the European comission
Over the last years we have seen a few of these reports both in Europe and in other parts of the World. The calculations are different from one report tp the other, but bottom line is the same´:
License fee versus consultancy expenses. measured over 3, 5 or perhaps 10 years.
Most companies, organizations and public offices is running one-year-budgets and we assume that the calculations must give some kind of truth. This is the micro economic truth.
From my point of view we need to see things more from a macro economic perspective. A perspective where we try to take into consideration if the society has a positive advantage of the choice.
If we take a close look at the comparison calculation for a short while, we will see that most expenses in the conventional solutions (closed systems) we will see that most of the expenses are license fees. The open source projects on the other side has almost no license fees but a lot of consulting, education and implementation expenses. Consulting work is often done by local IT-consultants.
My point is that from a society point of view the expenses in open source projects has a much higher value. License fees are not local.
The open source projects will create jobs and revenue in the local society and has a much higher value to the society. Projects with closed software will on the other hand send the money away and increase import. Unless ofcouse if you live en Reedmond, California.
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