LinuxWorld snubbed by Microsoft locked state governments

Stan Beer
Thursday, 23 March 2006 17:43

IT Industry - Market

The first LinuxWorld conference and expo to hit Australia promises to be an interesting event next week with some of the biggest names in the open source world from both the developer and vendor communities attending as exhibitors and delegates. Also heavily represented will be governments from within Australia and Asia Pacific, while two notable absentees will be the State Governments of Victoria and Queensland.

Government is shaping up to be one of the most important sectors for the open source movement and day three of LinuxWorld, which commences on 28 March, has been designated as Government Day, with a focus on what is happening with open source in the government sector in Australia and in several Asia-Pacific countries, including Malaysia and New Zealand. Senior representatives of the New South Wales, Western Australian and Australian Federal Governments will participate and lead some of the sessions, while Peter Quinn, the former CIO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, will talk about the ground breaking use of open source in that US state.

The absence of any representatives from the Governments of Victoria and Queensland, both of which are heavily financially committed Microsoft shops, stands in stark contrast to the active participation of the Federal Government, as well as the NSW and WA Governments, all of which which will outline their well-defined open source strategies. By comparison, neither of the two largest states after NSW have bothered to send even junior delegates as observers to LinuxWorld.

Bill Hilf from Microsoft won't be at the show either, but the likes of Jon "maddog" Hall, executive director of Linux International, Monica Kumar director of the Linux program at Oracle, Martin Fink, vice president of Linux at HP and others are expected to draw thousands of visitors to the three-day event.

While the inaugural LinuxWorld in Sydney is expected to be a relatively small first up event with about 200 delegates to the conference, many of the major IT vendors have supported the show, including IBM, HP, Oracle, Novell and Red Hat, among others....more