Why Microsoft is Australia's default buy

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 07:40

Opinion and Analysis

A veteran of Australia's open source industry says that unless government agencies make a fundamental decision to change technologies and then plan their move, the status quo will remain.
In other words, the chances of desktop Linux appearing in the Australian public sector in numbers is close to zero.

Con Zymaris, the chief executive of the Melbourne-based Cybersource, a company founded in 1991 to provide open source solutions, was speaking to iTWire soon after the deployment of Windows 7 netbooks by the Department of Education and Training in New South Wales.

Zymaris, who these days is mostly involved with training people in the use of OpenOffice,org, has a long history of involvement in FOSS, as a developer and advocate.

He spoke at length about FOSS in the country, the general state of the IT industry and the way forward.

iTWire: I was surprised to note that not a single company had bid for the Department of Education and Training netbook supply in NSW. I see a lot of companies represented on the Open Source Industry Association mailing list and I'm surprised that none put in even a token bid.

Con Zymaris: There are not enough companies in Australia with the muscle to put something in and have any real chance of success. The problem with something like this is the way bidding has gone in this country in the past, say, 15 or 20 years, where successive governments, both Labor and Liberal, have pushed towards larger and larger outsourcing components. It used to be that an agency would put out a tender for a small project - 50,000, or 100,000 or 200,000 - which was feasible for many small Australian companies to bid for.

But these big projects are beyond the reach of most Australian IT companies, certainly they are beyond the reach of any of the Australian open source companies. And it's coupled with the fact that it costs a lot of time and energy and money to put together a bid for a large project. It has to be tempered by the fact that you have to figure out what your chances of success are.

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