As a follow up on my post about InfoWorld’s recent article Open source lessons from the French, I wanted to react to this post by Matt Asay.  Matt debates with a dilemna: shoud governments fund open source, or not?  His (rightful) conclusion is that it’s not governments role to do so.  But then, who should?

Well, Matt, you actually provide the answers to your question.  Open source does not need to be funded by a government.  Open source funds itself, on the free market.  What a government (or a political system, for that matters) can do, and should do, is provide an environment in which the entrepreneurial spirit, the community spirit, and the open source spirit, can thrive.

The French government is doing a great job at promoting open source among its rising generations.  At Talend, we employ a group of young energetic engineers who joined us with a mind shaped by years of using open source in their schools.  And every summer, several interns join this team, and actually fight for the few positions we offer, proving that open source is a vivid concept in our engineering schools (in France, universities are state-run, and most private “grandes ecoles” are either directly or indirectly funded by the government or a major state-owned corporation - hence the goverment’s “responsibility” in the process).

But, to quote Bertrand in the InfoWorld article:  “All students in France use open source,” says Bertrand Diard, CEO and co-founder of Talend, a French pioneer of open source data integration software. “A lot of universities in the U.S., except probably MIT, use traditional tools like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.”

Conversely, French schools are not good at promoting the entrepreneurial spirit.  Hence, France produces great engineers, heads of development, CTOs (all of them are in great demand in the Silicon Valley) but few entrepreneurs (of course Bertrand and Fabrice, Talend’s co-founders, are the exception!).  Too few French schools have incubators, VC connections, licensing offices… the spirit is not there. No Sand Hill Road near Ecole Polytechnique or Supelec (sorry, I had to mention my Alma Mater, even though it did not teach me a lot about business) in France - this is not Stanford.

So where does that lead us?  To leverage the best of both worlds.  Inject more open source in US schools.  Inject more entrepreneur spirit in French schools.  Then replicate the model in other countries.  Easy, no?

Yves