While leading European brands such as Nokia, Phillips and Siemens export IT products worldwide, non-EU multi-national tech giants are growing their market footholds with popular products in every category, from PC hardware, operating systems and tech services to and mobile devices, telecommunications and cloud servers. Reliance on these outside forces and their proprietary technology not only eats away at competition from European products, but also sends millions of Euros outside the continent every year, never to be seen again.
Open-source software (OSS), a growing technological movement, delivers on security, stability and choice. The development of a rich OSS ecosystem will be key to growing the European IT products and services sector in the future. Powered both by every day computing ubiquity and the Internet’s community-building abilities, OSS is an informal system whereby millions of people globally plan, design and create software. Generally free of charge, end-users are also given the right to modify the software’s underlying code, and are encouraged to contribute to the project. Egalitarian and democratic principles mix, and the brightest and most productive software designers in the world spend their free time developing accessible and interoperable software suites.
This distributed model of application development has seen stunning results. OSS includes things like home-use applications, 3D games, business infrastructure, scientific tools and more. European OSS hackers are famous for the development of many important tech inventions, including the Linux operating system and even the Internet itself.
EU support of OSS has far surpassed that of many other leading governments of the world
EU support of OSS has far surpassed that of many other leading governments of the world, with the EU Digital Agenda showing Brussels’ strong stance on open software. This position is not always consistent, though, with direct lobbying by proprietary technology giants such as Microsoft successfully watering down official EU approval. This leaves the door open for continued software vendor lock-in.
Even so, the European private sector moves forward in supporting OSS work, with many large and small tech companies donating finance and man-hour contributions to the coding, design and community building necessary. The results are hardware, software and service innovations that feed back to public and private sectors with robust and low-cost technology. As intellectual IT centers grow, the response from the industry is to increasingly migrate towards where development and marketing activity takes place. If the EU can nurture its own open-source software development, there is little doubt that European companies will stand behind the drive of consumer products, services and innovations world-wide.
Adding value now to this fast-growing movement will reward the EU with a greater share and command in technology areas that in the future will count the most.
Follow the comments:
|
