The 2020 FLOSS Roadmap project
The Roadmap (2009 edition)
An Open Collaborative Process2020FLOSSRoadmap.org is an open collaborative site designed to discuss, comment and update the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap published in 2008 at Open World Forum. This site is supported by the 2 Paris Region’s Competitiveness Clusters. 2020 FLOSS Roadmap is divided in one synthesis and several themes each under the responsibility of a different director who were responsible to take the comments into account to produce the updated 2009 version. |
ParticipateParticipation is free and open to everyone.
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Roadmap presentation
2020 FLOSS Roadmap (2009 edition) - an executive summary is available here - is the product of studies carried out in seven key areas called “Themes”; each one is a text open for comments and discussions. 
- Theme 1: Public policies: promoting sustainable development of shared resources
- Theme 2: FLOSS: the key to future innovation and competitive differentiation?
- Theme 3: Ensuring sustainability for FLOSS developer communities and business ecosystems
- Theme 4: Technological and economic breakthroughs: challenge or opportunity for FLOSS?
- Theme 5: IT 3.0: towards new governance for information systems?
- Theme 6: FLOSS: a lever for employment and careers
- Theme 7: FLOSS in an Open World: Innovations and best practices from Brazil
- Theme 8: FLOSS and Financial System
The work on each theme is under the responsibility of its theme directors, who can produce new draft versions to take in account the comment on the present version. To propose a new theme, contact us.
Introduced in the 2008 version and continued in the 2009 edition The Open Cloud Tribune is a specific chapter dedicated to an highly controversial trend of IT Industry: Cloud Computing.
Finally, you will also find an appendix about FLOSS in India.
European Commission on Cloud
A workshop about “The Future of Cloud Computing” has been held in Brussels on the 26th of January. This workshop gathered 300 attendees from European Community and from other countries such as India, Japan and USA - this presence reminding the global nature of the topic and the necessity of international collaborations.
Organised by European Commission (EC), this event offered the opportunity for EC to expose the theme (see also agenda of the meeting) and to evaluate interest in the domain from European Academia and Industry. The first release of the report elaborated by an expert group, “The Future of Cloud Computing” was presented here (this report is available on http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai/docs/cloud-report-final.pdf and is open to comments).
In this workshop, the message “Cloud is the next big thing” was repeated clearly by all participants. Hope Europeans will understand it to re-energize European IT Industry.
A path from information to action
Introduction to 2010 Edition
While Open World Forum 2010 has been officially launched during last Steering Committee and Forum Committee’s meetings earlier in January, let’s have a look at what are the objectives of the 3rd edition of 2020 FLOSS Roadmap as it will be published end of September.
Full text of 2010 working document is freely available here.
Until now, 2020 FLOSS Roadmap has been conceived and perceived as a highly valuable source of information about FLOSS. But it has been also highlighted that it was lacking of tangible proposals. While keeping this informative quality, we consider that it is time for more concrete results in order to achieve our initial goal which was to produce an influential instrument for decision makers from public agencies to private companies.
The first version has defined the framework of our work, the second edition has validated the accuracy of this framework – 94 recommendations published for this 1st version. But more than this validation, the 2nd version of 2020 FLOSS Roadmap in its synthesis and recommendation, has also focused on 2 important points:
- FLOSS is like forests
- Acknowledge the intrinsic value of FLOSS infrastructure for essential applications as a public knowledge asset (or ‘as knowledge commons’), and consider new means to ensure its sustainable development
These points have opened new types of questions:
If FLOSS is like forests, is there a “forestry” for FLOSS? Is acknowledgment of FLOSS as commons a necessity?
Then if we answer positively to these questions, it opens even more other questions such as:
What are precisely the issues?
Would it not be necessary to go from information / recommendation – what has been done on the 2 last years – to more concrete actions? Which actions could be taken? And could these actions be taken in commons?
Would these issues necessitate to establish a specific organization(s)? Or could a network of loosely coupled organizations succeed?
We also expect other new and challenging questions from contributors to enrich the debates.
Answers to all these questions are expected to make of 2010 edition a “call for action” – vs. purely prospective analysis. Full text of 2010 working document is freely available here.
2010 edition will also follow up on what has been already established – as we did previous years (new themes from Systematic, Cap Digital and other contributors, plus analysis about Open Cloud, etc.)
Last but not least, if you are interested in challenging 2020 FLOSS Roadmap with uncovered issues or questions, you are welcome. Or if you would like to propose paper on new theme which you judge important for the future of FLOSS, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Full text of 2010 working document is freely available here.
Christmas 09 Gift: New Column
A new column is now available on 2020flossroadmap.org: Related Links
This new column is a collection of all links gathered since last edition of the road map thanks to all tweets, blogs and news published during this period. All these links are related to the key topics of our study:
- Commons
- Digital Economy, Copyrights, etc.
- Business Ecosystems
- Education, employment and careers
- Financial System
- Innovation
- IT, Governance
- Open Cloud, SaaS, Social Network, Micro Blogging, etc.
- Open World
- Open Science
- Predictions, Prospectives
- Public policies, Internet, Open Standards, Open Data
This column will be updated on a regular basis in order to identify the trends and the flows to be analysed in our 2010 edition. Please feel free to contact us for other links which you might consider as relevant.
We hope this will greatly enhance our results, and moreover that you will enjoy the diversity of collected articles.
We hope to see you somewhere on our road map for 2010, and wish you all the best for this coming year.
On the behalf of 2020 Floss Roadmap contributors, best wishes for the new year
FLOSS and commons: the roots
How etymology of the word commons illuminates FLOSS
When we started discussing about next version of 2020 Floss Roadmap, we agreed to insist on the importance of FLOSS to be acknowledged as a commons. And this brought to the table three questions: “why FLOSS should be considered as a commons?”, “Who has to acknowledged FLOSS as a commons?” and “How to make this commons sustainable?”. Analyzing the specificity of a commons and how it relates to FLOSS, Cedric Thomas[1] pointed us to Alain Lipietz [2]’s remarkable paper titled “Questions about Commons”. In this paper Lipietz gives a lot of insightful reflections about the nature of commons and especially exposes the etymology of the word commons: it finds its origin from the Norman word “commun”(still in use in French) which derives from Latin “munus”, which means both “gift” and “duty.” Sharing this information with David Bollier [3], he was so intrigued that we decided to translate this article into English. All together we highly recommend you to read this edifying text — English version / French version.
In “Questions about Commons “, Lipietz explains that “munus”... means both gift and duty. To receive a gift — a munus — is to be obliged to respond with a counter-gift.” This dual meaning reflects properly the intrinsic nature of FLOSS. Let’s have a look to GNU Linux with its large “com mun ity” [4] of contributors and its wide adoption: Linus Torvalds as “ benevolent dictator”, is in charge of regulating the commons i.e. GNU Linux Kernel. With “mun ificence”, he shares his source code freely, works at integrating contributions of other developers and finally he offers to anyone, free access and usage to a highly complex and valuable piece of technology. These days, Torvalds also gets a “re num eration” for his activities and has the ability to make a living out of this commons[5]. This dual meaning of “munus” explains also the mechanism by which FLOSS has the capability to transform software development into a virtuous circle, and at the end of the day, to deliver better and larger software for everyone. Reciprocity is at the heart of commons and FLOSS: developers give to you access and usage to software, and in return, you may (or may not) contribute under different forms such as adding code, providing bug reports or writing documentation. These basic principles are clearly exposed by Lipietz when he writes that “the commons are not [only] things, but social relations [to produce or create things]. “ And so is FLOSS: it is not yet another artifact but a process to develop software in a collaborative way, and this process can describe itself as a social relationship. Here we have our answer to our first question: actually Floss should be considered as a commons because both are of the same nature.
Lipietz provides also guidance to the two other issues i.e. acknowledgment and sustainability of FLOSS. Describing the historical relations which have always articulated the commons with political power and market, he describes what should be the rules of the game and who are the players.
Concerning political power, Lipietz develops the ideas of regulation of commons by the state and he adds that the state has a role to play in the redistribution of wealth generated by the commons. This implies also the responsibility of the state “for maintaining a local commons of global interest.” He precises that when “the state is the gatekeeper and custodian,” it “ is obliged to obtain the prior informed consent of the local community, if granted access, while sharing the profits with this community. “ Here we have good hope that under the influence of some pioneers such as Brazil or Canada, and in regards to recent positive signs in the Netherlands [6], in the UK [7] and in the USA [8], this key notion of reciprocity governing FLOSS, its usage and its sustainability, is starting to be understood and integrated by governments — the positions of powerful institutions such as DOD [9] or NATO [10] concerning FLOSS exemplifies this trend. May we expect that nations, European Union, United Nations, Unesco, etc. would officially acknowledge FLOSS as commons before 2020? Let’s work it out!
On the market side, if we consider that the market can serve the commons positively, then we can admit that this service should also be compensated by a fair “re mun eration.” The recent communication of Red Hat’s CEO to Obama’s administration about creation of jobs [11], is an example of good understanding on how FLOSS can benefit at the same time to private business and public good while preserving the integrity of commons. Actually we need companies to keep on contributing to commons, to get a remuneration and to facilitate the creation of healthy business ecosystems. But we also need to prevent this commons from any form of privatization. How is this feasible?
In fact the answer to this question belongs to multiple stakeholders i.e. to vibrant and various Floss communities, to renown activists such as R. Stallman or L. Lessig, to historical FLOSS “establishment” such as Free Software Foundation, Apache Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center,… and to members of civil society who are cautious for their freedom as citizens of a digital world, and join forces in organizations such as Electronic Frontier Foundation, Knowledge Ecology International, Quadrature du Net, April, … All of them are essential to assure that reciprocity is maintained in a sustainable manner, to make sure that the articulation of commons with political power and market is balanced at its best, and to sound the alarm when there is a risk of enclosure of the commons. All these individuals and organizations should be considered as key levers for making 2020 FLOSS Roadmap’s recommendation a reality i.e. “Acknowledge the intrinsic value of FLOSS infrastructure for essential applications as a public knowledge asset (or as ‘knowledge commons’), and consider new means to ensure its sustainable development.” So let’s count on them, support them and work with them.
Finally the key root of the word “Communication” being also “munus” (com mun icare i.e. to impart, share, or make common), we would like to thank Alain Lipietz for his insights which are nurturing our thoughts and are paving the way of our future communication.
Jean-Pierre Laisné,
2020 FLOSS Roadmap Team
Notes & References
1. Cedric Thomas is the CEO of the OW2 Consortium. See Cedric Thomas’ presentation “Open Source and its Communities” - slides 14-32
2. Alain Liptiez is a French engineer, economist and politician, and a member of the French Green Party.
3. David Bollier is a journalist, activist, and public policy analyst as well as Editor of Onthecommons.org and co-founder of Public Knowledge. A Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center, Bollier is the author of numerous highly praised books, including Brand Name Bullies and Silent Theft. He lives in Amherst, MA. You can find his blog about Lipietz’ speech here.
4. About etymology of community, see also P2PFoundation
5. Linus Torvalds works under Linux Foundation ’s auspices. Other examples about
Torvalds: “Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation. In 1999, both companies went public and Torvalds’ net worth shot up to roughly $20 million.”. More or less alike other key contributors to Linux kernel have also been hired by companies such as Red Hat, IBM, Novell, etc. (see “Linux Foundation Updates Study on Linux Development Statistics: Who Writes Linux and Who Supports It”)
6. “NL: Government to increase open source in key IT projects”
7. “Government-wide IT strategy to be launched in December”. See also “The great British open-source arms race “
8. “Five Technologies to See Huge Growth in US Gov’t, Group Says“. See also “Open sourcers aim selves at US gov“
9. USA DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (CIO): CLARIFYING GUIDANCE REGARDING OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE (OSS)
10. NATO: STRATEGY FOR THE USE OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN NATO SYSTEMS (Doc: AC/322-D(2009)0015 (INV)
11. “Red Hat’s CEO on Obama jobs summit – ‘Creating jobs the open source way‘”
What happened since 2nd edition of 2020 Floss Roadmap?
Here is a (too long?) report about what has been going on since 2nd edition was released.
Personal message
First of all and as some of you may have noticed, I broke my neck. And this accident prevented me to fully enjoy Open World Forum 2010, the presence of so many high level speakers and at last but not least to meet with some 2020 Floss Roadmap contributors (what a shame). I have just been able to participate for my presentation of 2nd edition of the Floss Road Map for the closing session thanks to some strong medicine: My apologies those who attended, I was pitiful 
But the good thing about this accident is that I discovered the Twitter power and was able to follow most of what happened during those 2 days and how enthusiastic attendees were about the program we had been preparing for months now. Since that day, I must admit I am addicted to this simplistic communication tool (BTW here is my twitter address). Therefore you will find a new right column on 2020FlossRoadmap.org with all “tweets” which I identified as being linked to the roadmap. #20FRM is the tag used to populate this column: Please feel free to use it when you find subject related to our works, it will be automatically listed on 2020FlossRoadmap.org.
Communication around 2020 Floss Roadmap
Concerning the communication around 2020 Floss Roadmap, we tried to make a better usage of social networks (Facebook, Linkedin, …) and bloggs than we did for the 1st edition (see the results here). The traffic on 2020flossroadmap.org significantly but momentarily raised: this type of communication can only be effective if done on a regular basis (any suggestion or help in this area is welcome).
Nevertheless the feedbacks that we received have been very encouraging. Particularly about the 2 principal messages of 2009 edition i.e. “Floss is like forests” and “Floss to be acknowledged as knowledge commons”. Actually it looks like our findings are in sync with history or at least “l’air du temps”: the clearest evidence being the Nobel in economic science which was awarded to Elinor Ostrom. Mrs Ostrom’s work focuses on the commons, such as how pools of users manage natural resources (knowledge being also considered as a natural resource) as common property. This “coincidence” has been highlighted by Glynn Moody’s article “Back to the Future: 2020 Roadmap Updated” . Matthew Aslett in his article “FOSS: War is over (if you want it)” also insisted on the importance of FLOSS to be acknowledged as a public knowledge asset. This gives a good perspective about where we should put our efforts for 2010 version of our Roadmap.
Open World Forum 2009: Great success, let’s do it again!
During Open World Forum’s debriefing and while I agreed with all contributors that OWF 2009 has been a great success, I suggested that for next year we should insist on the fact that FLOSS enables the alliance of technology and solidarity i.e. Floss as a mean to innovate (from technological to business aspects) but also as a social factor. I hope this orientation will be positively considered in the coming discussions about 2010 agenda.
Paris Accord
In the same period of time I have been fortunate to be invited at the 2nd round of Paris Accord thanks to Philippe Aigrain’s introduction. Paris Accord is a meeting organised by Transtlantic Consumer Dialogue and its focus is on identifying areas where consumers and creative and inventive communities can work closer together. Several of the clusters presented specific ideas about how the Paris Accord text might be implemented in concrete ways, including specific proposals for financing investments in knowledge as a public good.. During the Software session and its preparation, I had the opportunity to exchange with highly active and international FLOSS personalities about the recommendations we developed in the road map (see the agenda here). My inputs where mainly focused on FLOSS to be acknowledged as public goods and on which incentives and funding mechanisms have to be set up for these public goods to be sustainable. The resulting text upon which we agreed is available here.
One highly interesting finding out of these 2 days is that all activities traditionally managed under copyright control are facing the same type of issues when it comes to free/open access facilitated by technologies. As already mentioned in 2009 version when we discussed about data and contents, we need to take a close look at what is happening in other artistic domains such as music or films: I see a lot of issues echoed from one group to another. When Peter Jenner (respect for the producer of The Clash) says that “Recording industry goes from products to services”, does not that sound familiar? Or when he declares that “Piracy appears when appropriate offer does not exist”, is not that the value proposal of FLOSS? And when Hank Shocklee (big up for Public Enemy’s co-founder) argues that “In music today, consumers are also producers i.e. prosumers”, isn’t this related also to the virtuous circle of FLOSS. Thanks again to James Love and Malini Aisola from Knowledge Ecology International for setting up such a brilliant event.
Free Culture Forum and David Bollier
At the end of October, beginning of November, generous twitterers offered to me the possibility to follow Free Culture Forum in Barcelona. While you may find many interesting videos of the debates on the site http://fcforum.net/ (e.g. J. Rifkin about Distributed Capitalism), I would recommend you to have a close look to the charter resulting of these 3 days of discussions . This document is dealing with broader subject i.e. Culture but there are some common and interesting grounds with 2020 Floss Roadmap and OWF such as open standards, education, net neutrality, sustainability and finally once again commons. On this last topic, I was particularly intrigued by one message : “Governments should support the commons as it supports the market“. This quote excerpted from David Bollier‘ speech about Digital Republic (complete text here) was resuming simply and efficiently one of the thoughts which was in the air of all discussions we’ve been through since months now (By the way, I suspect most of the introduction of FCF charter to be written by Mr Bollier). David Bollier being an experienced commoner (he is a co-founder of Public Knowledge; editor of OntheCommons.org and an activist and writer about the commons – see my review of his last book “Viral Spiral”), I decided to contact him and David gently replied. We agreed to exchange about how to put into practice some of the points he exposed in Barcelona and some ideas we have in the roadmap.
Next steps
Thanks to the material that we collect daily, the fruitful contacts we establish around our works and the circumstances which look quite favourable (“l’air du temps”), it might be interesting to start discussing about 3rd version of 2020 Floss Roadmap, its directions and objectives. I will work on this in the coming days and expect to give some news in a week or two. This will give me time to fully recover (my neck is still not very flexible) and by the way to clarify some ideas.
Best wishes,
Jean-Pierre Laisné.
2009 Version in the news
Published few weeks ago, 2009 update of 2020 Floss Roadmap has been commented by journalists and bloggers (see In the News).
About 2009 recommendation, it sounds interesting to highlight here two similar feedbacks which bring some valuable food for thoughts and which might influence our future work.
- The first one is signed by Matthew Aslett in FOSS: War is over (if you want it):
“… And its in that context that we have seen the recommendation added to the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap, that FOSS should be recognised as a public knowledge asset. I think that this, as well as the other issues mentioned above, will represent some of the emerging battlegrounds for FOSS in the next decade as the movement moves from a position of acceptance to a position where collaboration and sharing is recognised as a key driver in the promotion of the European software industry, and in enabling the digital recovery.”
- The second one is from Glyn Moody in Back to the Future: 2020 Roadmap Updated:
“… for me the most important aspect is the following tiny new recommendation:
Acknowledge the intrinsic value of FLOSS infrastructure for essential applications as a public knowledge asset (or ‘as knowledge commons’), and consider new means to ensure its sustainable development
I think the sooner it becomes generally recognised that free software is a digital knowledge commons – one of many that are being created through open collaboration – the more people’s attitudes to it will change, and the more impact it will have.
It is no coincidence that one of the people awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics, was Elinor Ostrom, “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”. I look forward to reading next year’s 2020 roadmap, in the hope that it might explore more deeply this important concept. ”
Thanks a lot to both of them for their insight which help us greatly to validate our prospective.
Note: 2020 FLOSS Roadmap Team is looking for all kind of contributions. Please do not hesitate to contact us and to relay the publication of 2020 FLOSS Roadmap to your favorite sites and bloggs.
2020 FLOSS Roadmap reevaluates its projections
2020 FLOSS Roadmap reevaluates its projections and identifies significant changes in its 2009 edition.
For its first edition, Open World Forum had launched an initiative of prospective unique in the world: the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap. This Roadmap is a projection of the influences that will affect FLOSS until 2020, with descriptions of all FLOSS-related trends as anticipated by an international workgroup of 40 contributors over this period of time and highlights 7 predictions and 8 recommendations. 2009 edition of Open World Forum gave place to an update of this Roadmap reflecting the evolutions noted during the last months.
According to Jean-Pierre Laisné, coordinator of 2020 FLOSS Roadmap and Bull Open Source Strategy: “For the first edition of the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap, we had the ambition to bring to the debate a new lighting thanks to an introspective and prospective vision. This second edition demonstrates that not only this ambition is reached but that the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap is actually a guide describing the paths towards a knowledge economy and society based on intrinsic values of FLOSS.”
2009 Synthesis is now available!
2020 FLOSS Roadmap reevaluates its projections and identifies significant changes in its 2009 edition.
This edition is now published and will be presented during Open World Forum on October 2, 2009.
The 2009 Synthesis summarizes the discussions that have taken place during last months.
A printable version can be downloaded here and an executive summary is available here.
Please feel free to contribute and to comment here.
2009 Draft Open For Comment Now!
The Draft of 2009 version is now ready for your comments before final edition.
Participation is free and open to everyone. To comment, just click here and add your comment directly on the text (highlighted portions of the text show the locations of already existing comments)
The final version will be published for Open World Forum on October 2, 2009 and presented during the “2020 FLOSS Roadmap “closing session. This version is basically a synthesis of what happen in 2009 which may change our vision concerning the future of FLOSS. This based on different debates which were held worldwide to discuss 2020 FLOSS Roadmap.
Please feel free to comment, criticize, ammend this document (dead line : Sept 18, 2009). Thanks to your analysis and knowledge, we are quite sure that we can achieve one of the most relevant studies about FLOSS which will be used as reference by decision-makers.
Look forward to reading your comments.
2020 FLOSS Roadmap Team
2020 FLOSS Roadmap at CONSEGI, Brasilia
2020 FLOSS Roadmap was introduced to CONSEGI’s attendees on the 26th of August in Brazilia.
The II International Free Software Congress for E-Government was organized by the Free Software Comittee (CISL), executive secretary (at the Office House of the Presidency), by The Federal Service for Data Processing (Serpro, Ministry of Finance), and by the Secretary of Logistic for Information and Technology (SLTI, Ministery of Planning).
President of the Republic Luís Inácio Lula da Silva participated to the ceremony of opening of Consegi 2009 and insisted on the importance of FLOSS and the Brazilian technological community. “Brazil will be the paradigm of free software in the world”, he concluded.
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