No action scenario

Up to the present moment, almost no explicit support has been granted by governments in any part of the world to open source development. Therefore, this scenario assumes that things are going to progress following the same path.

Our consideration in this respect is that currently open source systems are already a noticeable part of our computing environment, especially in the server and development areas, where they are already playing an important role in the information technology infrastructure. As companies are discovering, it is possible to live off open source.

And as the Red Hat and VA Research IPOs have showed [15], the investors are already betting with their money on their capability to succeed.

If no action is taken by the European Commission and other governments, we can expect that only private companies and individuals will try to walk this route. Since the movement is already proving to be self-sustaining in both the economic and the technical field, and it is competing head to head with the leaders in several market niches, it seems unreasonable to doubt its future health.

Probably open source software will be used as a standard part of the infrastructure by most governments, without the need of any specific endorsement. Instead of buying some proprietary systems, some government offices will decide to buy open source systems and servers. In fact, this trend is already starting to take shape in several countries (at least in Europe). Open source will be preferred in many situations simply on economic or technical grounds, as a lower cost or technically better alternative to proprietary systems. In this case no specific benefit will be reaped by governments, or by the societies they serve, except for the direct cost savings on licences.

In this scenario (and in part also in the others), some threats for the open source movements will also have to be dealt with. Among them, some which are already being discussed within the open source community are:

• FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) techniques, used by companies or organizations committed to proprietary software, afraid of losing their market share or supremacy. Until now those techniques have not been a real problem, but the situation could change in the future, as more and more resources are devoted to this effort.
• Dissolution, due to systems and licences which can be confused with open source software, causing divisions in the community and in the code base, and in the long term, the loss of some of the advantages of the open source model.
• Ignorance, or loss of global vision, by the people composing the open source community. As more and more people come to use and produce open source software, there is the risk that a significant part of them don´t really understand how open source really works, and all the lessons learned by the community over the last few decades. This could lead to the conversion of open source in just another buzzword, without any real meaning for many people, and therefore to the loss of the real advantages of the model.
• Legal impediments. The legal framework could make more difficult, or even impossible, the progress of the open source movement. The issue of software patents (discussed in subsection 6.2) is one of the more obvious legal impediments that could be found in the next years

Some of these problems could be alleviated with the help of responsive governments, as will be discussed later.