In January 2007, the European Commission released a study about the economic impact of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) on the European (and global) ICT sector. It was prepared by a consortium of research institutions led by UNU-MERIT's Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. The findings include:

Commercial firms would need to spend 12 billion euro, or more than 160,000 person years, to produce the equivalent of what is currently available as free software.

• While the U.S. has an edge in large FLOSS-related businesses, Europe is home to a growing number of globally successful small- and medium-sized enterprises in this field. It also provides a comparatively high share of FLOSS developers. This could help to catch up with the U.S. in the creation of new software businesses.
• Though FLOSS provides ample opportunities for Europe, it is threatened by increasing moves in some policy circles to support regulation that seeks to protect old business models of creative industries, making it harder to develop new ways of doing business.

In the EU and in the U.S., under one fifth of software investment is in (proprietary) packaged software; the rest is in custom software and software developed in-house by user organizations.

Firms selling proprietary packaged software account for well below 10% of employment of software developers in the U.S. Custom software developers and service providers account for about 30%. But the majority of U.S. programmers work for “user” organizations such as banks, retail, and manufacturing sectors and government.