Rishab Ayer Gosh has led an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers through an enormous study of Free/Open Source Software. The paper, called "Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU," runs to 287 page. It exhaustively documents the way that Free/Open technologies dominate information technology and describes who actually writes Free/Open software. It also talks about what it would cost to replicate the benefits of Free/Open software through proprietary development (EU12 billion!), how many person years that would take (131,000!), and projects the total size of the Free/Open market in the years to come.
Rishab's one of my favorite researchers, a really sharp cookie who writes superbly. This is the most authoritative study of Free/Open code I've seen, and no one is better suited to write it than Rishab.
See also:
How many years does an Azeri have to work to buy a copy of WinXP?
