Last week, we
announced our intention to be one of the first to give the European
Commission’s FLOSS
report the attention it deserves and actually read and analyze the entire
287 page report. Our goal is to go
beyond the executive summary and provide a sober analysis of the report and
start a real conversation about what it means. As the recent
disputes over the report suggest, informed analysis is still sorely needed. 

Today we’ll focus on sections 2 through 5, which include the
report’s context, objectives, structure of the project team (something we won’t
analyze because we want to judge the value of the team’s ideas, not their
backgrounds) and methodology. 

To begin our analysis, we should address the focus and
purpose of this report, which has often been mischaracterized. Despite what some have claimed, this report
is not intended to endorse one licensing model over another, to refute
Microsoft’s Get The Facts Campaign,
or to suggest the world should go open source. In fact, the authors make the purpose of their research very clear on
page 14, in the Objectives section: 

“The study aimed to fill gaps in
our understanding of the impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitiveness of
the EU ICT sector…” 

Why has the European Commission focused the authors on the
ICT sector and FLOSS in particular? The
answer to this question is given in the Context section of the paper on page
13: 

“The ICT goods and services sector drives economic growth
and the EU’s competitiveness in this sector is therefore an important element of
achieving the Lisbon goals of becoming the most competitive knowledge economy by 2010. Within this
context…it is useful to better understand the impact of FLOSS on the ICT sector
and Europe’s industrial competitiveness.”

In short, this paper is a call to action for Europe’s policymakers,
arguing that European commitment to FLOSS is the best strategy to ignite its
economy and topple America’s current dominance of the ICT industry. The ambitious proposals in the report aim to do for Europe’s ICT
industry, what the EADS/Airbus project did for Europe’s aeronautics industry.

There is little question that Europe must do something to improve its innovative output if it the member states want
to remain competitive in the global economy. Despite committing to the
Lisbon Agenda in 2000, the declared ambition to make the EU “the most dynamic
and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010,”

Europe has made little if any progress according to
studies. The European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) 2005 report found that, if trends for the 25 EU nations were to maintain their
current pace, the innovation gap versus the U.S. would not be closed for at
least another 50 years.

[1]
The EIS highlights “a consistent innovation gap existing between the European
Union and the U.S.” according
to the French Office of Science & Technology.[2] And,
according to a report from the London School of Economics, the Lisbon Agenda
“seems to have made little difference for Europe’s
innovation performance.”[3]

This has left many of Europe’s
leaders looking for a spark to ignite their ICT sector and fuel community-wide
economic growth.

Countries in America and Asia are doing much better than us in developing new markets and new products – gaining the competitive edge.

– Neelie Kroes, European
Commissioner for Competition, November 2005.[4] 

It is essential for us to rediscover a taste for risk and pride in
innovation.

– French President Jacques Chirac, April 2006.[5]

The authors of the UNU-Merit report argue that an aggressive
commitment to FLOSS will provide that spark. Using what the authors suggest is Europe’s competitive advantage in open
source developers, the European ICT industry will be able to better compete
with America’s
ICT leaders.

It is a provocative and ambitious strategy. But is it sound? If the EU desires to adopt FLOSS as its
competitive advantage in ICT, would the data and proposals presented in the
UNU-MERIT study help? How do they
authors support their strategy and in the 274 pages that follow the executive
summary?

Those are some of the key questions we hope to answer in the
coming weeks. Starting with Section 6
later this week (we’re skipping the executive summary and have addressed most
of 2-5 above), we will analyze the report section by section, identifying the
value but also the pitfalls of the report.

We are also looking forward to constructive feedback from
our readers because this paper and its policy agenda deserve to be topics of
conversation, not just bits of rhetoric.

 

[1] The European
Trendchart on Innovation, European Innovation Scoreboard 2005, executive
summary available at http://www.trendchart.org/scoreboards/scoreboard2005/executive_summary.cfm.
See also http://www.trendchart.org/scoreboards/scoreboard2005/key_dimensions.cfm.

[2] Office
of Science and Technology at the French Embassy in the

US, “France ‘average’ in European
Commission Innovation Scorecard”, June 2, 2006, available at http://www.ambafrance-us.org/sst/home/page.asp?LNG=us&target=news&ID=509.

[3] Center
for Economic Performance, “Boosting Innovation and Productivity Growth in
Europe: The hope and realities of the EU’s ‘Lisbon agenda’”, London School of Economics,
September 2006, available at http://cep.lse.ac.uk/briefings/pa_lisbon_agenda.pdf.

[4] Neelie
Kroes, “Innovation from a Business Perspective: the State Aid Aspects”, Brussels, Nov. 17, 2005,
available at http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/05/703&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

[5] Jacques
Chirac, Parisaddressing French CEOs in  Paris, as quoted in Peter Fairley, “France’s
Effort to Spawn a New Google”, MIT Technology Review, May 5, 2006,
available at http://www.techreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=biztech&sc=&id=16775&pg=1