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While fastidiously avoiding use of the F-word [i.e. freedom], the European Commission has published a very long report on the impact of open source software and hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy. Open hardware is also covered.
This study analyses the economic impact of Open Source Software (OSS) and Hardware (OSH) on the European economy. It was commissioned by the European Commission's DG CONNECT.
It is estimated that companies located in the EU invested around €1 billion in OSS in 2018, which resulted in an impact on the European economy of between €65 and €95 billion. The analysis estimates a cost-benefit ratio of above 1:4 and predicts that an increase of 10% of OSS contributions would annually generate an additional 0.4% to 0.6% GDP as well as more than 600 additional ICT start-ups in the EU. Case studies reveal that by procuring OSS instead of proprietary software, the public sector could reduce the total cost of ownership, avoid vendor lock-in and thus increase its digital autonomy. The study also contains an analysis of existing public policy actions in Europe and around the world.
Back in 2006, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh prepared a similar report for UNU-MERIT, Study on the effect on the development of the information society of European public bodies making their own software available as open source, in The Netherlands.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Sunday September 12 2021, @08:34PM
As the other reply stated, this is about PCB design. Altium is sort of the major corporate choice, expensive. KiCAD is a free project and growing. They were able to get out of the "typical FLOSS crap" hole mostly due to CERN backing and with that momentum got a commercial entity backing and improving it. Not too long, the Altium user attitude about KiCAD was about "nice toy you have there, really great, but now we have to actually work, so let's all kick that in the garbage can and get back to business". In the meantime, KiCAD got good enough for about 98% of Altium jobs - but also vice versa. Much of the recent RasPi stuff is done on KiCAD, to give an example.
So Altium see the writing on the wall, get into panic mode and pay a formerly somewhat respected influencer, which I intentionally don't name here, on YT to effectively produce commercials on how to start designing with Altium. They must also have made some "first fix is free" version to go with that. And that guy did some really simple stuff aimed at non-professionals. I just thought "how low can you go???". Without even considering the entirely senseless promotion of lock-in with subscription, you'd have done all of that in KiCAD in the time it would take for the Altium license agreement to scroll by. Pathetic.