The free software market in France continues to grow. It now represents 11% of the digital market and 16% of services, according to an annual study presented jointly this week by the CNLL, Numeum and Systematic Paris-Région.
The sector of open source companies nearly 6 billion euros in France in 2022. The turnover of the sector should even grow faster than that of the global software and digital services market in the next five years, according to the report.
Overall, the diffusion of the cloud has made it possible to reinforce the use of open source. The study notes that in Open Source software, SaaS represents 29% in 2022 and will become the majority by 2027 – as opposed to on-premise software which is losing ground.
“Year after year, Open Source continues to grow, with a very encouraging prospect of nearly 8% per year between 2022 and 2027. This strong growth shows the growing influence of Open Source on the digital economy in France. , as in Europe” declares Marc Palazon, president of the Open Source Commission and administrator of Numeum.
Increased skill requirements
Organizations that embrace open source weigh cost savings in the balance, and prioritize “ease of collaboration and skill development.”
But the sector also needs to recruit. The study underlines that the sector will have to train and recruit “more than 26,000 new full-time equivalents (FTE) by 2027”, to swell the ranks of the 64,000 current employees.
The needs concern developer positions, DevOps or marketing profiles, such as architects and business consultants. Demands are strong in terms of programming languages (Java, Javascript, PHP, Python, etc.), technological solutions (Docker, Drupal, etc.) and databases (MySQL, PostgresSQL, etc.) but also in open source business application terms.
To strengthen the ecosystem, some players are also calling for a genuine industrial policy. “Among the measures we expect: a proactive purchasing policy on the part of the public sector; dedicated funding that takes into account the economic models specific to free software; pro-competitive measures that limit the ability of players in a dominant position to lock the market to the detriment of SMEs; reinforced requirements around open standards; a dedicated training policy” explains Stéfane Fermigier, co-president of the CNLL.