FR: Government economic commission recommends Open Source

"Increase competition between commercial and Open Source software", is the 58th recommendation of Attali's commission. The policy advisers estimate that Open Source software equals some 131.000 man-year of work, half of which is donated by European developers and represents billions of Euro in investment. "Using Open Source software helps companies to cut costs for research and development, by an average of 36 per cent. Open Source has a market of only 2 percent, though it is growing by 40 percent annually, estimates the commission.

The Attali report lists three recommendations. First, competition between the two types of software should be increased in bidding for new IT projects, including public projects. As a result in 2012 at least 20 percent of all applications developed for or installed by the public sector should be Open Source.
As in the United States, the French government should secondly consider tax benefits to stimulate Open Source development. The third recommendation is that France helps to establish international rules on interoperability between Open and closed source software.

The recommendations were criticised by the French association of software publishers, Afdel. According to a new report by Le Monde Informatique, the association said that the commission Attali turned its back on innovation by recommending Open Source. Afdel fears commercial software companies will be excluded from public IT projects. "The commission Attali surprisingly favours a strategy to cut costs, instead of favouring the growth of an industry that employs 60,000 people", Le Monde Informatique quotes the chairman of Afdel, Patrick Bertrand, chief executive of the management software development company Cegid.

Attali's commission was set up this summer up by France's president Nicolas Sarkozy. The commission published its report titled '300 Decisions for Changing France' on January 23.

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Further information:

• The Attali Report (in French)
• News item by Le Monde Informatique  (in French)
• Afdel