The European Commission has published its final report on the Economic Impact of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) on innovation and competitiveness of the EU ICT sector. - "The high share of European FLOSS developers provides a unique opportunity to create new software businesses and reach towards the Lisbon goals of making Europe the most competitive knowledge economy by 2010." (More on this at a later date.) - "Firms have invested an estimated Euro 1.2 billion in developing FLOSS software that is made freely available. Such firms represent in total at least 565 000 jobs and Euro 263 billion in annual revenue." Expanding on the latter, the report has some interesting statistics about who is responsible for open source code. According to the study, at the end of 2005, 61.2% of code had been developed by individuals, according to copyright and credit claims, while 19.2% was claimed my companies, 5.6% universities, and 7.9% foundations. ... http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf ... _______________________________________________ http://olpc.ellak.gr/