Forecasting software technology is always risky. But we will try to describe some possible scenarios of how the support of the European Commission and governments could impact on the future of the open source movement. However, the variability of the approaches, and the great mobility of the information technology environment makes it difficult to do `crystal ball' predictions. And, in any case, the open source movement has already proved how it can progress by itself. In fact it is astounding how it has done it so well with so little outside support (including support from governments and big corporations).
That said, let us just sketch the following cases: