Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 08:40
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 6
iTWire: Are you saying that they have had some success?
CZ: They've had some success, particularly in NSW, Department of Commerce and some other agencies have deployed Linux desktops. We're looking in the realm of the hundreds. It's a big jump to go from the hundreds to the tens of thousands, possibly the hundreds of thousands that we're looking at for the netbooks. But it boils down fundamentally to the fact that we do not have the model of technology adoption in Australia that is required to deploy a different technology platform.
It doesn't work to just do the same-old same-old. Substantial difference in procurement has to happen for any real deployment of Linux desktops to occur because it's a major shift in strategic positioning for any one of these government agencies. It's not a case of 'it'd be nice to deploy a wiki, we don't have a wiki, look there's an open source wiki, that looks reasonable, let's deploy it'. That's the way open source is being deployed in the public sector here, that type of path, but not 'we want to change desktops to something that's different from what we currently do'.
iTWire: Are you talking about the numbers only or the complexity of the project?
CZ: The biggest thing from the public sector point of view is risk. Companies can take it up but the agencies wouldn't be interested in having them take it up. The block is the agencies themselves. They are just not interested. The government agencies are not interested in deploying desktop Linux, client-side Linux. Where they have deployed Linux is in areas where it is seen to be completely commensurately risk-free from the industry perspective.
iTWire: Are you then saying that a Microsoft solution is risk-free?
CZ: It's risk-free in the sense that if it fouls up, that's what the industry selected, so the industry is at fault rather than the agency.
iTWire: So it's a question of passing the buck?
CZ: Passing the buck as with all things. It's more so with agencies than anywhere else that nobody ever got fired for buying, insert name of player here.
iTWire: This may have been a plausible argument five years ago. But given the progress that free and open source software has made, and given that government should look to implement the cheapest and best solution, don't you think FOSS should be getting more chances?
CZ: I would agree, but obviously they don't see it in the same way. From their perspective if they either haven't done the serious risk analysis or the risk analysis has been done and it shows for them that they would get more howls of protest if they went with a Linux solution than if they stayed with the status quo, then that's what they would do. They are just staying with the status quo. From their perspective, that's whatever Microsoft pushes out, whatever it's called, it is the Microsoft desktop o-s in its various guises.
The only way that they could seriously move away from that is to make a decision at some point that they will move away and implement a strategic multi-year framework and all the steps that are necessary to achieve that. That's what has had to happen in other countries. Tn other countries, they can't just say 'next week we're shifting to Linux, let's sign the deals with the appropriate vendor and off we go'. It doesn't work that way. But the agencies, in whatever way, shape or form, make that decision, whether it's internal people or external consultants who are brought in to do the analysis that shows them they can benefit from a number of different financial, strategic and possibly even security perspectives, at the end of the day it's the agency that makes the decision.
At no point do they go to market like our agencies do and say, anyone who wants to bid for a desktop do so and then we make a selection. It doesn't work that way. If you look at the path towards Linux desktops and open source client-side computing in all these other government agencies, it's all based on this flight path of the agency that makes the decision 'we will do this, what do we need to do to achieve it?'
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