Large FLOSS Study Gets the Real Facts

Hans Kwint writes "The European Commission's enterprise and industry department has just released the final draft of what could be the biggest academic interdisciplinary study on the economic / innovative impacts of free/libre/open source software (1.8-MB PDF). The study was done by an international consortium led by the United Nations University / University of Maastricht. The lead researcher, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, has overseen a large volume of FLOSS studies in the last few years, including ones on FLOSS policies and worldwide FLOSS adoption. This academic-grade study has a very broad scope and has collected real-world information that is valuable for both companies and government bodies thinking about migration. The study is about the economic impact of FLOSS, not excluding the hidden indirect impact. It compares scenarios of open and proprietary software futures of Europe. The study looks at the FLOSS's competitiveness compared to proprietary software and also provides a few TCO comparison case-studies.

Well?

[RealGrouchy (943109)]

This study compares... This study looks at... It's the biggest FLOSS study since sliced breadboards

Yeah, sure. It's a study. That's nice. What does it say?

I'm not going to read a 1.8 mb PDF TFA unless I know whether or not its conclusions agree with my predisposed bias!

- RG>

Re:Well?

[nxtr (813179)]

I'm not going to read a 1.8 mb PDF TFA unless I know whether or not its conclusions agree with my predisposed bias!

You must be old here!

Re:Well?

[Technician (215283)]

I'm not going to read a 1.8 mb PDF TFA unless I know whether or not its conclusions agree with my predisposed bias!

You don't have to. Start in the table of contents and you will find the conclusion is on a single page. It's on page 283. It's a PDF so I can't cut and paste and If you are not going to read it, I'm not taking the time to retype the conclusion page.

For me, I like the conclusion. MS will not.

Re:Well?

[by Anonymous Coward]

12.7. Conclusions

Our analysis has been performed on six organizations in different European countries.
The majority of them are public bodies. The organizations have followed different types of
migration on the base of their context.

We have investigated the costs of migration, and the cost of ownership of the old and
the new solution differentiating them between the costs of purchasing and the costs of
ownership of the software solutions. Special attention has been put on the intangible nature of
the costs. Costs have been classified in categories defined trough existing studies and selected
by a top down approach called Goal Question Metric. This instrument has been also used to
define the questionnaires used to collect the data.

Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports
of savings on the long term costs of ownership of the software products.

Costs to migrate to an open solution are relevant and an organization needs to
consider an extra effort for this. However these costs are temporary and manly are budgeted
in less than one year. The major factor of cost of the new solution even in the case that the
open solution is mixed with closed software is costs for peer or ad hoc training. These are
the best example of intangible costs that often are not foreseen in a transition. On the other
hand not providing a specific training may cause and adverse attitude toward the new
technology. Fortunately those costs are limited in time and are not strictly linked to the nature
of the new software adopted.

We also investigated the productivity of the employees in using Microsoft office and
OpenOffice.org. Office suites are widely used and are a good test bed and representative for a
comparison on issues like effort and time spent in the daily routine of work. Delays in the
task deliveries may have a bigger impact than costs on the organization's management. Our
findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of
OpenOffice.org.

Re:Well?

[Daemonic (575884)]

these costs are temporary and manly

It's official - OSS is manly.

Re:Well?

[perlionex (703104)]

I have no qualms about extracted good, useful conclusions from well-researched academic papers so others don't have to download a 1.8MB file. (Thanks for pointing out the usefulness of the conclusion, though).

From page 283 (emphasis mine):

Conclusion

Our analysis has been performed on six organizations in different European countries. The majority of them are public bodies. The organizations have followed different types of migration on the base of their context.

We have investigated the costs of migration, and the cost of ownership of the old and the new solution differentiating them between the costs of purchasing and the costs of ownership of the software solutions. Special attention has been put on the intangible nature of the costs. Costs have been classified in categories defined trough existing studies and selected by a top down approach called Goal Question Metric. This instrument has been also used to define the questionnaires used to collect the data.

Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports of savings on the long term - costs of ownership of the software products.

Costs to migrate to an open solution are relevant and an organization needs to consider an extra effort for this. However these costs are temporary and manly are budgeted in less than one year. The major factor of cost of the new solution - even in the case that the open solution is mixed with closed software - is costs for peer or ad hoc training. These are the best example of intangible costs that often are not foreseen in a transition. On the other hand not providing a specific training may cause and adverse attitude toward the new technology. Fortunately those costs are limited in time and are not strictly linked to the nature of the new software adopted.

We also investigated the productivity of the employees in using Microsoft office and OpenOffice.org. Office suites are widely used and are a good test bed and representative for a comparison on issues like effort and time spent in the daily routine of work. Delays in the task deliveries may have a bigger impact than costs on the organization's management. Our findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of OpenOffice.org.

Re:Well?

[ThePhilips (752041)]

To be honest, when I first saw the line, I also wanted to make similar post.

But then - just before hitting "Reply to This" - I recalled all the nightmares of supporting M$Office documents my company have had in past. All the bugs and regressions of OO.o cannot cover experience with M$Office in networked environment.

Our favorite biggest sucker is M$O document with global system architecture spec: opening from network drive of the 20 page (about 200k thanks to diagrams) document takes 2 to 5 minutes. Always. Nobody knows what M$Word does - but it basicly hangs and then later happily pop-ups from background with open document reporting neither error nor warning. Copy the document from networked repository to local harddrive - and it opens instantly. Open it as it is supposed to be open - and locked - on servers and ... here we go. (Actually we also have several document which take ages to open regardless of where from you open them: locally or remotely. But it just everybody has to work with sys arch spec often - so it is major P.I.T.A.)

OO.o is bloated, ugly, slow, feature-poor, buggy and inconsistent. Its macro language is total and utter undocumented crap (N.B. I hate VBA - no language could be worse. Or so I thought. Before I have seen StarBasic (or whatever that thing is called)). BUT. In three years of deployment we found no single major blocker, which prevented us from using OO.o internally.

Re:Well?

[Wolfbone (668810)]

"Start in the table of contents and you will find the conclusion is on a single page. It's on page 283."

No it's not. That's only the conclusion page for section 12, "Appendix 2: Report on user-level productivity and relative cost of FLOSS / proprietary software." The executive summary is the where the overall conclusions can be found in this paper. The whole thing is considerably more than just a TCO study.

Re:Well?

[WaZiX (766733)]

It's a PDF so I can't cut and paste and If you are not going to read it, I'm not taking the time to retype the conclusion page.

I Can:



12.7. Conclusions

Our analysis has been performed on six organizations in different European countries. The majority of them are public bodies. The organizations have followed different types of migration on the base of their context.

We have investigated the costs of migration, and the cost of ownership of the old and the new solution differentiating them between the costs of purchasing and the costs of ownership of the software solutions. Special attention has been put on the intangible nature of the costs. Costs have been classified in categories defined trough existing studies and selected by a top down approach called Goal Question Metric. This instrument has been also used to define the questionnaires used to collect the data.

Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports of savings on the long term - costs of ownership of the software products.

Costs to migrate to an open solution are relevant and an organization needs to consider an extra effort for this. However these costs are temporary and manly are budgeted in less than one year. The major factor of cost of the new solution - even in the case that the open solution is mixed with closed software - is costs for peer or ad hoc training. These are the best example of intangible costs that often are not foreseen in a transition. On the other hand not providing a specific training may cause and adverse attitude toward the new technology. Fortunately those costs are limited in time and are not strictly linked to the nature of the new software adopted.

We also investigated the productivity of the employees in using Microsoft office and OpenOffice.org. Office suites are widely used and are a good test bed and representative for a comparison on issues like effort and time spent in the daily routine of work. Delays in the task deliveries may have a bigger impact than costs on the organization's management. Our findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of OpenOffice.org.

12.7.1. Considerations

With our analysis we achieve a good level of understanding of the costs, benefits and productivity of a transition. The following are the considerations we have drawn upon.

1. Before buying, upgrading proprietary office software one needs consider that: OpenOffice.org has all the functionalities that public offices need to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations Upgrading office programs is time-consuming and expensive. It requires installation time, potential document conversions, and new training. It also poses a risk because some documents containing code or macros may not be readable anymore OpenOffice.org is free, extremely stable, and supports the ISO Open Document Standard.

2. In our study the motivations to transit to OSS are: the exchange of documents in an open shared format (ODS), reuse of old hardware in some cases, and being independent of software vendors even when creating a distribution or an application for local needs. Employees may perceive that their work is under-valued using 'cheap' OSS products or changing operating model to OSS is problematic. Economic impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitiveness of the EU ICT sector © 2006 MERIT. Prepared on November 20, 2006 284 To overcome these pre-conception it is recommended to adopt a policy of both ad hoc and periodic training to fill the lack of knowledge/experience in relation to what OSS products are appropriate and how they might be deployed.

3. It is not always justified to base the migration on the promise of lower license costs, although in our study initial purchasing costs are lower for the OSS (they includes deployment and customization for the first run of the configuration). This is because these costs are too much influenced

Summary of Conclusions

[sameeer (946332)]

this is pure laziness by the story poster. I don't come to slashdot to read 286 page documents, the whole purpose of a news site is to give me news, and then link to the complete document.

Anyway, for the benefit of others, I shall attempt to quote relevant sentences from the conclusion.

Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports of savings on the long term costs of ownership of the software products.

Costs to migrate to an open solution are relevant and an organization needs to consider an extra effort for this. However these costs are temporary and manly are budgeted in less than one year.

OpenOffice.org has all the functionalities that public offices need to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations

We also investigated the productivity of the employees in using Microsoft office and OpenOffice.org....Our findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of OpenOffice.org.

Employees may perceive that their work is under-valued using 'cheap' OSS products or changing operating model to OSS is problematic.

To overcome these pre-conception it is recommended to adopt a policy of both ad hoc and periodic training to fill the lack of knowledge/experience in relation to what OSS products are appropriate and how they might be deployed.

It is not always justified to base the migration on the promise of lower license costs

Another good crucial reason of costs is training. Although training costs are a substantial part of the migration costs their benefits can be realized over time.

There are no extra costs due to lack of productivity arising from the use of the OOo.

Someone who reads the whole thing might be able to do justice to the summary of the document, but for many, this should suffice.

Interesting facts

[omeg (907329)]

If you don't want to read through the entire PDF (which I can understand, since it's 287 pages in size), there are some interesting figures in the first paragraph which highlights the study's key findings.

"Europe is the leading region in terms of globally collaborating FLOSS software developers, and leads in terms of global project leaders, followed closely by North America (interestingly, more in the East Coast than the West), Asia and Latin America face disadvantages at least partially due to language barriers, but may have an increasing share of developers active in local communities."

"Weighted by regional PC penetration, central Europe and Scandinavia provide disproportionally high numbers of developers; weighted by average income, India is the leading provider of FLOSS developers by far, followed by China."

"The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally. This code base has been doubling every 18-24 months over the past eight years, and this growth is projected to continue for several more years."

"The existing base of FLOSS software represents a lower bound of about 131.000 real person-years of effort that has been devoted exclusively by programmers. As this is mostly by individuals not directly paid for development, it represents a significant gap in national accounts of productivity. [...]"

"Defined broadly, FLOSS-related services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010. [...]"

"[...] FLOSS and proprietary software show a ration of 30:70 (overlapping) in recent job postings indicating significant demand for FLOSS-related skills."

There is a huge amount of information in this PDF, and while it pertains directly to Europe, it's also interesting to read for people who don't live there. Basically, it discusses the role of software libre in the European economy (both its direct and indirect impacts), and its general trends, scenarios and policy strategies. Everything is in great detail, too.

Load of FUD

[bh_doc (930270)]

This is stupid! It's the biggest load of crap I've ever seen! I wonder who paid them to write this?

What? Generally favourable?

Well, it's about time someone did a proper study! I'm glad to see there are some people who aren't complete corporate shills!

An even shorter Executive Summary...

[perlionex (703104)]

(of pages 9-12 of the PDF article)

FLOSS role in the economy

• FLOSS applications are first, second or third-rung products in terms of market share in several markets
• FLOSS market penetration is also high
• Almost two-thirds of FLOSS software is still written by individuals
• Europe is the leading region in terms of globally collaborating FLOSS software developers
• (more details on specific role in Europe in paper)

Direct economic impact

• The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally... code base has been doubling every 18-24 months
• This existing base of FLOSS software represents a lower bound of about 131 000 real person-years of effort that has been devoted exclusively by programmers... it represents a significant gap in national accounts of productivity
• Firms have invested an estimated Euro 1.2 billion in developing FLOSS software that is
• made freely available... represent in total at least 565 000 jobs and Euro 263 billion in annual revenue
• FLOSS-related services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010
• (more statistics in the paper)

Indirect economic impact

• Strong network effects in ICT... risk leading to innovation resources being excessively allocated to defensive innovation. There is a case for a rebalancing of innovation incentives... (to target) publicly available technology for new functionality.
• FLOSS potentially saves industry over 36% in software R&D investment
• ...a large and increasing share of user-generated content is not accounted for and needs to be addressed by policy makers
• Increased FLOSS use may provide a way for Europe to compensate for a low GDP share of ICT investment relative to the US

Trends, scenarios and policy strategies

• Doubling the rate of FLOSS take-up in Europe would result in a software share of investment at 1.5% of GDP, reducing but not closing this investment gap with the US
• Europe's strengths regarding FLOSS are its strong community of active developers, small firms and secondary software industry; weaknesses include Europe's generally low level of ICT investment and low rate of FLOSS adoption by large industry compared to the US
• FLOSS provides opportunities in Europe for new businesses, a greater role in the wider information society and a business model that suits European SMEs
• Europe faces three scenarios: CLOSED, where existing business models are entrenched... GENERIC, where current mixed policies lead to a gradual growth of FLOSS... VOLUNTARY, where policies and the market develop to recognise and utilise the potential of FLOSS
• (goes on to suggest policy initiatives to support FLOSS)

But will it change people's religion?

[heretic108 (454817)]

I've never seen such a thorough and methodical compilation of real-world evidence in favour of F[L]OSS.

However, the 'proprietary vs FLOSS' debate is a battle which each day seems to more resemble the 'biblical literalism versus evolution' debate. Just like the biblical literalists who hang on to their denials of evolution, despite the evidence, there'll be those who'll never be convinced about the benefits of FLOSS, and will always be there as suckers to sustain the likes of Microsoft.

Kinda puts an ironic twist on the old adage: "To those who believe, no proof is necessary. To those who disbelieve, no proof is possible."

Re:But will it change people's religion?

[paniq (833972)]

I don't think you can compare a discussion about whether to use FLOSS or not with whether to believe in "intelligent design" or not.

Unlike with the Open Source issue, believing in evolution or not does not matter. No matter what you believe how the world was born, this will not change the past, and it will certainly have no influence on the way you work.

The benefits of Open Source are nothing you can discuss about once the research has been done. And so far we are only talking about those objective business figures. The whole subjective part of it has only been covered in a handful of books, Eric S. Raymonds "Cathedral and Bazaar" being one of it.

Now this is entirely subjective, and needs to be backed up by objective research, but I'm confident I'm not the only one:

I am 26. I started programming when I was 9. For 15 years, I was exclusively using non-free products. Since I switched to working with open source products 2 years ago, my productivity has boasted. I have more work-related contacts than ever. I participate in various projects. I learn so much every day - about programming, and especially about working with other people. Because of those contacts, I get inside scoops and information that in non-free terms would be regarded as "classified". I feel that I shape myself into someone who will be able to do quite good consulting one day. I can safely say that my knowledge has never grown this fast.

Now show me anyone who can claim the opposite: "I used free software for 15 years, now I switched to non-free software, boy my productivity sky-rocketed! And I know so many people now!" - in fact, try to twist arguments and see if the shoe still fits. I can not see free software going away, and I can not see longtime users migrating back to Windows.

This is not a question of religion. This is a question of performance and optimal work flow.

Document Properties

[OhneWorte (956071)]

Well, if you look at the document properties what do you find? It was created with PScript.dll under Windows.
I hope they have learned their lesson from their study themselves... :-/

Ohne Worte

Funding sources

[l2718 (514756)]

Based on project homepage [flossworld.org], especially the list of parnters [flossworld.org], it seems that this study was mostly financed by the EU. The secondary sources include interested parties (an association of Indian IT companies, Mitsubishi) and non-interested ones (e.g. the Soros foundation). This leads me to trust the study more than ones funded by Redhat and Microsoft.

This study doasn't have a real impact

[laplace_man (856560)]

The truth is that every country in EU made their own study on office software. I live in Slovenia and I just found similar study comparing transition of government 11.800 workstations to Open Office. It clearly says NO to open source for 3 years. It's a document dating 14.11.2005. This study has a conclusion that migrating software from MS to Open Office is possible and functionality of both packages are more then enough for government needs. The things that changed their mind and are considered greater risk that brings higher costs over this 3 year period are:

- retraining people
- doc-> odf conversion (especially concerned about automatic conversion of documents-especially macros in doc files)
- and of course very concerned about support (there is no company's supporting Open Office - or they have no real business plans) what they see as the greatest risk migrating to ODF !!

This is 5 page document giving some numbers WITHOUT ANY EXPLANATIONS where those numbers came from. The only thing I noticed is that they ware waiting what happens in Munich at the time.They clearly know for IDABC initiative for ODF - ISO format. Their strategy is making public tenders to create support Open Office.
What I'm really concerned about is that there is no plan for gradual adoption of ODF. If there is a serious intent for adopting ODF I'd expect at least .gov sites offering ODF formats as well as .doc and .pdf. THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE REAL TRANSITION SHOULD START AS WELL AS INSTALLING OPEN OFFICE ON GOV COMPUTERS FOR TESTING AND GRADUAL ADOPTION.

Anyway I see this document as excuse to FLOSS community without any REAL intent to change things in the future.
This is the real picture of FLOSS support in EU. The point is that country's in EU take this reports as consideration but on the end they make their own conclusions based on MS deals because they can't make or don't want to make a real cost comparison.

Groklaw has the Conclusions

[giafly (926567)]

Conclusions and Comment [groklaw.net]

One interesting negative point concerned those people (sometimes found here too) who believe that you only get what you pay for.

Employees may perceive that their work is under-valued using 'cheap' OSS products.

Re:FLOSS

[Whiney Mac Fanboy (963289)]

For those that don't know, FLOSS stands for 'Free Linux Open Source Software'.

Nonsense! The 'L' stands for "lossless" - FLOSS is much better than the lossy Closed Source Software out there ;-)

Re:FLOSS

[perlionex (703104)]

Rubbish.

Both the article summary, original paper (page 9) and Wikipedia article you linked to clearly state that FLOSS = "Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS)".

Or were you too busy trying to get First Post?

Re:FLOSS?

[elf-fire (715733)]

Well. You know. Libre as in beer.

Re:FLOSS?

[perlionex (703104)]

The Wikipedia article on "FLOSS" [wikipedia.org] states:

"Libre software" was first used publicly in 2000, by the European Commission... The word "libre", borrowed from the Spanish and French languages, does not have the freedom/cost ambiguity problem that "free" does.

"FLOSS" was used in 2001 as a project acronym by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh as an acronym for Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. Later that year, the European Commission (EC) used the phrase when they funded a study on the topic.

Note that Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is the same author of this academic paper.

Re:FLOSS in Europe - In reality

[mwvdlee (775178)]

Actually, I think the Netherlands are funding a national group which is working on the Dutch spellchecker and thesaurus for OpenOffice. They are funding the work that programmers don't do, that's why you're not seeing it.

As for the need for studies; I'm thankful they are researching before making decissions.
You seem to assume OSS is always better and think a government should assume the same. What studies like these show is parameters for when moving to OSS is a good idea.

There are already pretty large scale OSS migrations in the EU, so they are actually using OSS. I wouldn't be surprised if non-development related use of OSS is far greater in governments than in corporations at the moment.

Re:Excellent paper! But...

[strider44 (650833)]

Don't be idiotic. I might just extend my assumption of "not read the paper" to "not read any serious paper". Your "conclusions in the paper" were the conclusions for the last section in the appendix. It wasn't even part of the paper - you obviously flipped to the end and read a subsection called "Conclusions" without realising it wasn't part of the actual paper. (even though there are several other subsections throughout the paper labelled "Conclusions", and you never ever put conclusions for the entire paper in a bloody subsection) Look at the Executive Summary for the real findings - that's what the Executive Summary is for.