As much as this world is becoming a loosely-knitted fabric of transnational communication and borderless exchange of goods and services, many small companies (like mine) primarily make their money on the local market. Money they use to pay local employees, adding diversity to the employment mix which ideally might reduce the chances for other Renault scenarios to happen. Add open source to this, and it becomes obvious that the government, through fair distribution of research funds, can help to support small local companies who create open source applications, which can then be used for free by that same government. It's good to see that my main pet peeve and goal for 2005 has already been touched by Simon on two occasions. Now if only the IWT and other research-funding government organizations would stop spending the vast majority of their money on fake research institutes, blue-sky academic research or big companies with entire departments triple-funded with Belgian or EU money, I would be a very happy man. It's painful to see so much money is spent on biotech research (the business park we are located in hosts at least four large buildings with people playing with worms and mice, several of them built with taxpayer's money), while the software industry over here is still very much in the hands of the usual corporate suspects and some large consulting/integrator/bodyshopping companies. Very non-innovative indeed.
Update: funny to see this linked on Slashdot while typing my post. Participants: Research and Academic Institutions: INRIA, France (Project Coordinator) - University of Paris 7, France - Tel-Aviv University, Israel - University of Geneva, Switzerland - University of Zürich, Switzerland - CSP Torino, Italy. Private Companies: Edge-IT, France, a Mandrakesoft subsidiary (Project Manager) - NUXEO, France - NEXEDI, France - SOT, Finland. Now, can someone explain me how 2.2 mio EUR is going to be split amongst no less than 10 project participants in 5 countries? How much is going to be spent on travel and project management? How many of the academic researchers will have two or three projects they've received funding for, and how much time they'll actually are going to spend on this single one?
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