The Attali Report: A Lot of Good Ideas – But Also Some Seriously Bad Ones!

On January 23, the Attali Committee, a French high-level group led by prominent economist and political advisor Jacques Attali, published its report on how to boost economic competitiveness in France.

The report, which seeks to liberate the French economy from excessive regulation and administrative burdens, contains a lot of sensible and useful recommendations.

Thus, the Attali Committee suggests concentrating tax credits for R&D expenses on key high tech sectors, including the digital technology industry.

This is an important development for small and medium-sized companies in the ICT sector.

The Attali Report also recommends creating ten top-level research centers to bring together researchers and universities; reducing the payment time for sums due from the state and major enterprises to SMEs; promoting R&D investment in ICT; and creating a Small Business Agency to represent the interests of SMEs before public administrations.

All of this is great news for France’s innovative ICT entrepreneurs (such as our friends Michael Setton from Cyberfab and Eric Groise from OCTO Technology).    

Unfortunately, in other parts, the Attali Report contradicts its own intentions. 

One of the objectives the report lays out is to have 20% open source software for new applications in the public sector by 2012. 

In other words, the reports’ authors recommend intervention in the market when it comes to public sector software procurement.

This amounts to giving an advantage to open source software through public procurement and undermines state agencies’ flexibility to choose the technology that best suits the needs of the task at hand. 

As it turns out, AFDEL, the French Association of Software Developers, shares my concern about the “20% open source objective.”  In a Reuters article (in French) and in an article in French business daily Les Echos, AFDEL points out that the recommendations on open source “undermine investment in innovation.”

I agree.

Even though Jacques Attali was appointed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, the proposals contained in the report are only recommendations so far.

Let’s hope that President Sarkozy will implement most, but not all, of them!