Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 08:40
Opinion and Analysis
Page 4 of 6
iTWire: So there has to be a fundamental decision to change over first?
CZ: Yes. And it's not happening here. It hasn't happened here in any substantial way, in any government agency that I know with the exception of fairly small, but fairly innovative entities like the National Archives and segments within the military research establishment. DSTO, for example, has been a longtime user of major Linux client-side resources as well as supercomputing resources and whatever supercomputing resources that the government agencies fund which is once again considered the mainstream.
iTWire: Don't these government agencies learn from each other?
CZ: None of them are really doing it. The agencies that are doing it aren't really on the radar in any way, shape or form as far as the other agencies are concerned. When you look at the public sector, the last time I did a headcount NSW had 30 public sector agencies, Victoria has about 17, the Federal Government has something close to 200 - we're not counting most of the other states, Queensland has a big public sector, probably as big as Victoria - you tally them and you're looking at several hundred. Only the really large players are on anybody's radar - defence, education, health and so forth. And none of these major players are shifting away from the status quo.
iTWire: You don't see any chances of this happening in the future either?
CZ: Tomorrow, if large tracts of English-speaking public sector agencies around the world started shifting to desktop Linux, then there would be pressure on the local agencies to do something similar in the near future. I don't see that happening in the US or the UK...
iTWire: Why does Australia always look to the US and UK and not Europe?
CZ: It's what we're focused on - whether it's good or bad.
iTWire: In Europe as you know, there are a large number of deployments of Linux which have been successful...
CZ: There have been but we don't pay attention to Europe. They don't speak English therefore they are not on our radar. The further someone is from English, the further away they are culturally, the less we pay attention to them. Ninety percent of our IT industry focus is the US, which is silly, because in many ways the US has stopped being the trendsetter for anything but dot-com related and Web 2.0-related technologies. For many, many years now, whether it's in telecommunications or infrastructure, a lot of the technology has shifted to eastern Asia, southern Asia and Europe but yet we are still US-focused. We pay as much attention to other countries as we do to their celebrities - we pay utmost attention to American celebrities. It's a similar mindset. It's not good but that's the reality.
iTWire: Isn't Australia supposed to be some kind of leader when it comes to open source?
CZ: In terms of development and smarts at that level we punch above our weight. We're not anywhere near the top of the stack. In some ways we tend to kid ourselves that we are right at the top, but if you look at the outputs of the Scandinavian countries and Northern Europe, the Dutch and the Germans in particular, you see that they do a brilliant job, they are right at the top. If you analysed you would find that Australia's position in the IT industry as a whole, globally, based on the proprietary side of our software and products side of out industry is woeful. On the open source side, we are doing very, very well.
If our local IT industry as a whole had the same output if you like, as our open source sector, then we'd be doing a fantastic job, But we lack a number of things that are fundamental to the proprietary side of the industry, the marketing and the management skills to make global companies, we completely lack that, with a few rare exceptions. But many of those requirements are not needed in the open source space. You don't really need the same kind of marketing, you don't really need the same kind of capital injection to be able to reach global markets. which is why when we do open source stuff, technologies like LAMS and Moodle and so on, we do it well.
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