I am not sure if i just don't understand the terms used, but it sounds to me like they are investing 600.000+€ just to
find out the effect of open source on the society, worldwide.
Extract (bolded parts by me):
QUOTE
1 Human capacity building: investigating FLOSS communities as informal skills development environments, with economic value for employment generation
2 Software development: what are the regional and international differences – technical, organisational, business – between FLOSS projects across countries?
3 e-Government policy: what policies and behaviour do governments around the world adopt towards FLOSS, open standards and interoperability?
Following and in parallel with the research tracks will be a fourth track, for workshops and building further collaboration:
4 workshops and working group activities to build an international research and policy development constituency: regional and international workshops and focused working groups from the represented target regions. A first phase focuses on actual collaboration by implementing tasks 1 to 3, the second phase focuses on analysis and building concrete future collaborations. Global dissemination is part of this track, as is the engagement of organisations outside the FLOSSWorld consortium.
Appart from the bolded comments, the fourth point really just says investing in making more of such investigations.
Sure the study will have an effect on Open source, but... I don't see this as funding it.