A group of open source developers have set out some ambitious predictions and targets for open source software for 2020.
The 2020 Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) roadmap, released at the Open World Forum in Paris, made a number of predictions of the role open source software would have on the IT industry.
They predicted that open source software would become mainstream and become the standard in IT industry areas like infrastructure, development tools, scientific computing and some embedded software.
It was also claimed that open source software could help bridge the global digital divide, thanks to the existence of legal environments around the world which could protect future collaboration.
The report said of the future of open source: "Conditions are conductive to launching initiatives that could lead to widespread economic development, and this would in turn have a significant impact on a large number of activities, enterprises, and as a result on employment."
It was predicted that 40 per cent of IT jobs were going to be open source software related, with a two per cent annual growth in employment translating into 1.5 million jobs in Europe.
Business systems were predicted to work like a concertina based on a combination of both open source and proprietary models.
Cloud computing was also expected to be the norm, with social networks expected to be the main way to interact and communicate, fulfilling both industry and public sector requirements.
