Mr. Bernard Lang and Professor Jacques Crémer will debate the question: Should governments promote the use of open source software? Open source software, such as Linux, has developed a significant following among computer users and business. Officials in some countries, including in some EU member states, have been debating whether their governments should actively promote or use open source software. Some have already passed measures officially endorsing it.

Our two distinguished thinkers--an economist and a computer scientist –bring very different perspectives to this issue and will offer opposing views on what role, if any, government should play in promoting open source software and its implications for innovation, intellectual property rights, and the future of computing.

Bernard Lang is a Senior Investigator at the l'Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA), the French National Research Institute in Computer Science and Control. After arriving at the Institute in the early 1970s, he began research that contributed to the development of HTML, the language that serves as the basis of the Internet. He is the founding secretary of AFUL, Association Francophone des Utilisateurs de Linux et des Logiciels Libres, and a member of the administrative council for the French chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-France). Mr. Lang was a member of the European Working Group on Libre Software, which was created at the initiative of the Information Society Directorate General to analyze the free software phenomenon.

Professor Jacques Crémer is professor of economics at the IDEI (Institut d'Economie Industrielle) and Director of the Ecole Doctorale de Sciences Economiques, both of the Université des Sciences Sociales de Toulouse I. He is also Professor, Ecole Polytechnique. Professor Crémer received his Ingénieur diplômé de l’Ecole Polytechnique; his M.S. Management from MIT; and his Ph. D. Economics from MIT. He has been a visiting professor at the Ecole Polytechnique; Université de Paris I (Sorbonne); Université de Paris IX (Dauphine); and the Université d’Aix-Marseille. He is the editor of the Rand Journal of Economics and Associate Editor of the European Economic Review. He is a member of the editorial board of the Annales d’Economie et de Statistiques; the Mathematical Social Sciences; the Journal of Economic Literature and a Member of the Council of the Econometric Society. Professor Crémer is the co-author of Some Reflections on Open Source Software (with Eloic Peyrache and Jean Tirole) in Communications & Stratégies, 2000; and Regulating the Internet? in Regulation of Network Utilities:The European Experience (Claude Henry, Michel Matheu and Alain Jeunemaître, eds, Oxford University Press, 2001).