Geopolitically, countries in Asia, the Americas, and Africa see Open Source as an opportunity to home-grow their much needed information technologies. In Europe as on other continents, governments are ostensibly using Open Source as proof of their intent to address the “digital divide.”  But all this focus upon the when, how, and to-what-degree of Open Source adoption also raises awareness of the many questions that still beg hard answers.

In order to elevate Open Source to become part of governmental economic and information policy, questions need  tracking:

Where can we expect to see Open Source work best?
When can the Open Source approach fail?
How does Open Source feed today’s knowledge economies?
What ancillary impact can Open Source have on projects to advance defense, fight against disease, protect the environment, maximize profits?

Naming 2004 as the Year of Research for Open Source, it is not to obliterate past research, but to understand that the new work represents a  significant departure from the past glut of papers by analyst groups advancing the philosophical merits of Open Source. Large policy-making bodies are seeking more than philosophical tracts; they are commissioning serious, quantifiable feedback on OSS not in terms of virtues but in terms of lessons to be learned from developers and business software vendors in the frontlines. This is about UN representatives and NGO groups advising national leaders trying to prepare for major policy decisions. Look around and you see influential bodies looking at Open Source to prop national economic and political policies.

The World Bank's Information for Development Program (infoDev) sponsored a study that was released in December, titled  "Open Source Software Perspectives for Development."  Written by Paul Dravis, the report was released in Geneva alongside the event of the World Summit on the Information Society. 

WSIS is an attempt by the UN to extend the reach of information technology throughout the world. The 44-page Dravis report was compiled with the goal of helping global decision makers better understand Open Source software when assessing it as a technology option. Dravis lists initiatives by governments, some private-sector uses of Open Source, commercial technology providers that support Open Source, case studies in developing countries, and he offers some comments about the legal landscape.

The World Bank has gone on record as being interested in any approach that can empower the economies of developing countries. These countries need “cheap and efficient technology to make the giant leaps necessary to catch up with the rest of the world," Bruno Lanvin, the World Bank's Program Manager for infoDev, said at a conference in June. Open Source, for Lanvin and colleagues, is seen as something that opens up the ability to communicate and exchange information. FOSS stimulates the creation of helpful information exchanges, which in turn opens up major opportunities to advance technology development projects.

As Dravis says in his December report, “OSS strategies, if properly executed, can alter the posture of a developing country from primarily a consumer of ICT [information and communication technologies] products and services to a provider as well. …Consideration should be given to the ability of local stakeholders to provide an ICT environment that can be owned and adapted by their community.”  At the same time, the report doesn’t exactly call for people to convene at the nearest football stadium for a public burning of every copy of MS-Word. "A purist perspective on OSS may envision a world of solely open source solutions. It is more realistic that software infrastructures will consist of a mix of both proprietary and open source software."

The report notes that a gradual migration to OSS is an option, now that one can run proprietary software in a Linux environment or Open Source software in a Windows environment. This makes sense, he suggests, for some organizations to leverage the experience with OSS server-based services as they develop "expertise in OSS required for its broader adoption."

The National Science Foundation is the federal agency that supports research in science and engineering. At the University of California, Irvine, it is Dr. Walter Scacchi, senior research scientist, and colleagues at the Institute for Software Research who are capturing attention with their series of empirical studies about the Open Source communities. What he is finding is that Open Source and free software development is faster, better, cheaper in building a community. One of the advantages foreseen is helping businesses understand the implications of internally adopting Open Source methods or investing in Open Source communities.

Scaachi comments on the significance of these investigations: "While there is a growing popular literature attesting to open software, there is little in the way of careful systematic empirical study that informs how such communities produce software; how they coordinate software development across different settings; and what social processes, work practices, and organizational contexts are necessary to their success." He says that research communities and commercial enterprises will benefit from better-grounded theories that allow effective investment of their resources.

Taking this one step further, David Hart of the NSF provides additional context for these research endeavors. "They are also trying to determine if Open Source software is appropriate for projects that have fixed requirements and are of interest to a limited community, such as air-defense radar software."

FLOSS in its very acronym is a sign of the times. Shared code and freedom to modify code are upheld by varied camps, and FLOSS accommodates all adherents. The Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study was commissioned by the European Commission in July 2002 and carried out by the International Institute of Infonomics of the University of Maastricht. They were out to study the population of developers to pin down who they are, how much they contribute, and why they do it. The goal was to fill the gap in prevailing data about the use of Open Source/Free Software, and the EC-commissioned report sought hard data: monetary and non-monetary activity, authors' contributions, business models, best practices, and policy/regulatory impacts included.

As pervasive as that study's directions were, another FLOSS survey was in order to fill the geographic gap. The 2002 Maastricht-led survey used responses from 2,784 OS/FS developers, but 71% lived in Europe or Russia and only 13% lived in the United States.

To extend the perspective, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) carried out The FLOSS-US survey in 2003.  SIEPR's study leaders asked the same questions in the first survey along with some new ones: What's the responding developer's role? What's the extent and intensity of his or her contribution? What support did the project get from proprietary firms? What's the project's relationship with commercial enterprises?

For the Asian perspective, the Mitsubishi Research Institute is conducting a survey of Open Source software developers that is supported by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). As with the America survey, extra questions were added, this time relevant to what the study seeks to know about Asian developers: English skills, whether their community is domestic or global, Linux qualifications, and income from OS/FS development.