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Our Blogs Open Sauce Selling open source to the powers-that-be | Selling open source to the powers-that-be |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Monday, 16 March 2009 | |
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Eminent Australian lawyer Geoffrey Robertson is well known for devising this kind of situ-drama for TV and, often, using his scenarios to put people on the spot. It was a different kind of hypothetical situation devised in Brisbane on Wednesday, one in which four seasoned IT practitioners and one expert in economic consulting were asked to try and sell the idea of open source to a minister in the Queensland government. Posing the queries was Sam Higgins, the chief research analyst at Brisbane ICT consultancy Longhaus; on the other side of the table were Andrew Eddie, development coordinator for the Joomla! project, Paul Gampe of Red Hat Brisbane, Brendan Kelly, co-leader for IBM's worldwide open source community of practice, Damian Hickey of ZacWare, and Steven Brown, of Economic Futures Australia. Higgins came up with various permutations of the theme, including one where a considerable sum of money had been granted for the development of open source in the state. But, no matter who was on the other end, the main selling point of open source was always distilled down to one thing - open standards. For example, Gampe pointed out that open standards would ensure that people always had access to their own information and proffered the example of Open Document Format versus the proprietary formats offered by Microsoft Word. He said there had been massive investment by the Queensland government in IT but the proprietary nature of products prevented utilisation; open source, on the other hand, allowed companies to deploy software solutions as they needed, bending the software to their needs. With proprietary solutions, one needed to buy something new for every little need. Backing up his idea, he said that when governments ensured that the data created about their own citizens was kept open, the take up of open source would automatically increase, simply because it was more cost-effective to use free software to handle documents and data which conformed to open standards. And thereafter there would be a snowball effect - more take up would mean that there was a demand for more people who were familiar with open source software which would, in turn, lead to the need for more development to cater to future needs. CONTINUED |
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