Free software communities
Open source, or free software as it was originally called, has become in recent years one of the most talked about phenomena in the ICT world. This is remarkable, not only for the usual reasons that open source has been around for many years as a volunteer driven success story before being discovered by big business and now government, but also because it has largely developed on its own without the headline coverage and glare of international attention that it now receives.

This in turn makes it more attractive to governments and policy makers. Yet what is the special value of open source software, and how can it be harnessed? The Free/

Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) study in 2002, a comprehensive study of developers and users, showed that the most important reason for developers to participate in open source communities was to learn new skills — ‘for free’. These skills are valuable, help developers get jobs and can help create and sustain small businesses. Meanwhile, the most important reasons given by users of OSS were not the lower costs but the higher security and better performance as compared to proprietary software. Therefore, the open source method of development is clearly seen by users as being innovative and providing the same or better quality.

The FLOSS survey also showed that while just over 30 per cent of all developers earn directly from their support, development or administration of OSS, a further 20 per cent earn indirectly, most of whom reported being given a job because of their experience in developing OSS. This indicates that employers value the skills that are learnt through participation in the developer community.

This finding was also supported by the FLOSS survey of user organisations, of which 36 per cent reported allowing their employees to participate in open source projects during their time at work.

To a considerable degree, therefore, the OSS community must be regarded as an informal and skill development environment that provides good training, and competitive advantages on the labour market. It is ‘costless’ in that the costs for training are not explicitly borne in monetary terms by any of the parties benefiting from the new skills made available in the market. Universities are not paying for this training (only 20 per cent of developers are students), and nor, explicitly are companies, it is the individual developers themselves who are contributing their time and effort to learn and teach others in an informal ‘apprenticeship’ system. As these costs are social costs distributed widely across individual participants, they are effectively a subsidy for sectors of society which do not or cannot explicitly pay for skill development.

This skill development process is particularly valuable for small businesses and for less wealthy regions and countries, where the high direct costs of training ICT professionals may otherwise hinder the development of a local information economy. Participation in the global open source community can help offset such costs by effectively providing a (voluntary) subsidy from the global community.

The FLOSS study showed that developers who provided ‘learning new skills’ as their reason for joining the community often show ‘sharing skills’ as an equally or more important reason for continuing their community participation. This is correlated with the duration of their participation in the community, naturally, and represents a shift from ‘apprenticeship’ to ‘mentor’ roles. In a reflection of the development process for individuals, countries that profit most from open source are those that contribute back to the community and knowledge base, and there is a built-in incentive (and low barriers) for a shift from being a recipient of skills to being a skills donor. So the process of ‘subsidy’ is very dynamic, and is likely to lead not to a dependency relationship but rather to a equal relationship based on, among other things, local specialisations for locally relevant issues.

Such skill development extends to the creation of new, local businesses, which are able to provide commercial support for and build upon OSS in a way not possible with proprietary software. This effect is heightened by any public support of the open source software sector. For example, the taking up of open source by the Extremadura region in Spain through its support for the LinEx project (a localised, Spanish-language version of the GNU/Linux operating environment) has led to an economic regeneration in a relatively poor region of the EU. This has not just allowed the implementation of activities for a lower price, but also enabled activities especially in education and training which were simply not possible with proprietary software. It has also led to the growth of a number of small businesses to provide commercial support, since with open source there is no need to approach one sole vendor for support — approaching local entrepreneurs is possible and an obvious choice.