40% of IT jobs will be related to open source by 2020

Last week, the 78 pages 2020 FLOSS Roadmap Version 2.16 has been tabled in the Open World Forum (OWF) in Paris. OWF is a forum dedicated to free/libre/open source software (FLOSS), its players and projects.

This 2020 FLOSS Roadmap report is the OWF’s main manifesto, and is designed to support discussions taking place during the different OWF seminars and forums. It is a prospective and projection to the influences that will affect FLOSS between now (2008) and 2020, with descriptions of all FLOSS-related trends as anticipated by OWF contributors over this period of time. It also highlights all sectors that will, potentially, be impacted by FLOSS, from the economy to the Information Society.

Studies have been carried out in seven key areas:

• Theme 1: Public policies: promoting sustainable development of sharedresources
• Theme 2: FLOSS: the key to future innovation and competitive differentiation?
• Theme 3: Ensuring sustainability for FLOSS developer communities and businessecosystems
• Theme 4: Technological and economic breakthroughs: challenge or opportunityfor 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

The report predicted that within the next 12 years, 40% of IT jobs will be related to open source, and open source-based cloud computing will be solving many problems in the real world.

The roadmap has outlined seven areas of change for 2020, which are:

• FLOSS will become mainstream. It will be the de facto standard for areas such as development tools, infrastructure and scientific computing, as well as being widespread in other sectors
• 40% of IT jobs will be related to FLOSS
• FLOSS will free businesses from vendor lock-in, providing a "vaccine against abusive behaviour from a commercial vendor"
• FLOSS will help reduce the global digital divide, as it is a collaborative effort that works for sustainable development of a shared resource
• Open source communities will help build business ecosystems for specific markets
  Green datacentres will lead to business models with a low ecological impact, in "the next industrial revolution"
• Cloud computing will be ubiquitous, and social networking will be the main way to communicate with businesses and government

Click here to download the comprehensive 2020 FLOSS Roadmap Version 2.16.