Paul Everitt

Zope Europe Association

Lisbon Agenda and Open Source
18 minutes, 8.3mb, recorded 2005-10-19
Paul Everitt

The European Union's Lisbon Agenda laid out a ten year plan to produce the world’s leading knowledge economy by 2010, but all the while the US continues to dominate the software sector. Case in point, Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) innovations that begin in Europe often end up migrating their talents and profits to the US. In this presentation, Paul Everitt makes a compelling case that economic goals of Open Source entrepreneurs and the political goals of the EU planners have much to offer each other.

Despite FLOSS's sometimes anti-establishment image, Everitt points to strong synergies between free software and free markets. The majority of open source developers are European, and a good number make their living building small businesses based on open standards. Despite these strengths, a large chunk of money spent on software in Europe currently goes to American companies. Even Linux pioneer Linus Torvalds moved from Helsinki to pursue opportunities in California and Oregon.

Everitt argues the EU and open source community have common goals, some complementary strengths and weaknesses, and some common enemies. Connecting the continent's developer community to the EU's political and economic agenda could stem the outflow of ideas and profits, and increase European competitiveness. Programmers could benefit from from EU patronage in the form of grants and business leadership training. Everitt closes with some practical recommendations on ways to get the connections and the money flowing in mutually beneficial directions.



Paul Everitt is the founder of Zope Europe Association, a non-profit business partner network. He is a board member of OSCOM, the executive director of the Plone Foundation, and a co-founder of the Zope Corporation. Everitt also serves as the president of Zope UK.

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