Section 6 – Singing the Praises of FLOSS to Create the Next European Idol

In our last blog post, we discussed how the European Commission’s FLOSS report is a call to action for Europe’s policymakers. The ambitious proposals in the report aim to do for Europe’s ICT industry, what the Airbus project did for Europe’s aeronautics industry.

If you’re going to have industrial policy, however, you need the industry. In Section 6—FLOSS Role in the Economy: Market Share and Geography – the authors argue that Europe has both parts of a successful FLOSS industry equation: developers and users. This section is not a “build it and they will come” proposition; rather, the authors proclaim to policymakers “build FLOSS apps because FLOSS developers are already here.”

In the first of two posts about Section 6, we will analyze the discussion of FLOSS use in Europe and the rest of the world.

How Popular is FLOSS? 

It is an undeniable fact that the use of free and open source software is growing rapidly throughout the world and in Europe. In some cases, FLOSS software applications are even outpacing all of their proprietary competitors. Section 6 provides statistics and data from dozens of sources to back this up, including such powerful stats as:

According to Forrester, by the end of 2005, 40% of European firms had “adopted” FLOSS. 

An IDC 2005 Western European end-user survey of 625 firms showed over 40% FLOSS rates of “use” in the operating system and nearly 60% usage of databases. 

A Walli/Gynn/von Rotz survey finds that 87% of 512 companies surveyed were “using” open source software. 

A 2004 IDC report prepared for OSDL finds that the Linux share of total server “shipments and redeployments” will reach 27% in 2008.

Not surprisingly, the dogs are eating the dog food (or cats/cat food if you’re a cat person). FLOSS usage in both the private and public sectors is on the rise—and in some applications—dominant—according to the report’s presentation of survey data on firm usage by application type and by industry in Europe, North America, South America, and Asia.

While these data unquestionably support the truism that FLOSS use is growing rapidly, the authors admit it would be dangerous to draw more specific conclusions from it: 

Due to the heterogeneity of the data with regard to methodologies and scope of collection, the comparability of the figures presented in the following is limited. Therefore the market shares of FLOSS products in a specific region may vary between the different studies – often conducted by third parties – to which we refer.

 Here are just a couple instances of where the lack of data normalization creates problems: 

• The Forrester survey is a study of how many companies have “adopted” FLOSS. Yet the IDC survey refers to “use.” The difference between “use” and “adoption” is unclear. 

• The 2005 IDC study breaks down “use” into “significant, some or limited” and the report glowingly reports that nearly 60% of firms surveyed show use of FLOSS databases. Yet, only 30% report significant live use. Over half of firms report either that they have no plans, have a pilot project in place, are considering it, or they “don’t know.”  

• Sometimes the data is directly inconsistent. In one location, the report mentions that the share of Linux on servers in Brazil is about 12% (p.32). However, an earlier graphic shows that Linux is the main operating system for 34% of servers in Brazil (Figure 7, p.24). 

Yes, consistent terminology matters. Drawing conclusions from disparate data sets is difficult at best and unreliable at worst. 

Which FLOSS applications are used the most? 

So there’s increasing use of FLOSS software. But which FLOSS applications are used the most? 

MERIT conducted its own survey of FLOSS systems used in European public bodies. 47 % of public sector institutions use GNU/Linux, 34% for MySQL and Apache, 26% for Mozilla, and 24% for PHP (See Figure 12, p.29). Four of these make up the popular “LAMP” software stack (all but Mozilla). 

As the summary findings state: 

FLOSS applications are first, second or third-rung products in terms of market share in several markets, including web servers, server operating systems, desktop operating systems, web browsers, databases, e-mail and other ICT infrastructure systems. FLOSS market share for operating systems and desktops is higher in Europe than in the US, followed by Asia.

The data certainly back up the summary findings: some FLOSS applications have made significant inroads into the private and public sector. However, this section does suggest one other potential problem with the analysis.

The authors are lumping together all software licensed under any of the Free, Libre, and/or Open Source licenses. Important distinctions exist in these licenses, particularly as they relate to the business models possible while using them.

Lumping all licenses together risks overstating the case for FLOSS. Some of the top software listed in Figure 12 are listed under dual licenses — for instance, MySQL is distributed under the GPL and a commercial license. While the study mentions the practice of dual licensing in the beginning of section 6, and expands upon it in section 7, there’s no way to differentiate the commercial from the GPL adoption in data from the surveys cited in the paper. 

FLOSS is Doing Well, Why Do We Need to Artificially Stimulate Demand

The authors write that according to the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, in 2005 most of the 265 worldwide public-sector FLOSS projects were “preferred initiatives” (p.27)—i.e. preferences.

Are mandates driving public sector adoption more than TCO analysis? It would be foolish for EU policymakers to design policies around increased FLOSS market share, when the increase is due to government—not free market—demand. It’s too easy to be popular, but not necessarily better, when legally preferred (or worse, mandated). 

Even if the statistics are only half as good as they seem, the market is working well. Do we need to artificially stimulate demand for FLOSS? 

If anything, policymakers should realize that growing adoption rates are evidence that demand sweeteners in the form of government preferences or mandates are NOT needed. FLOSS is becoming popular on its own—even though we don’t precisely know just how popular.