Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Firstly, the survey data shows open source companies are actually very structured and sizeable – not to mention viable – organisations. Over $500 million in revenue is raised by open source companies.
Most of this – between 70% and 80% - is made up by the staple of software development and customisation, implementation and migration and support and maintenance. These are the most common commercial services as well as the most lucrative services. 75% of respondents indicated the bulk of their income came from these areas alone. 43% identified software development as their most profitable service.
This survey finding has two stated ramifications. The first is that open source provides an opportunity to government for a national export. The deficit between IT imports and exports in Australia is sizeable, which makes sense given the amount of hardware and software which flows in from overseas. Yet, fostering open source development gives an opportunity to provide commercial exports back with a low or zero cost outlay. In fact, 45% of the respondents service international markets.
Additionally, the survey finding becomes an effective response to the argument that open source solutions are unreliable because they have little to no vendor support. In fact, this argument was the chief concern expressed by government agencies in a previous survey. Hence, the Waugh’s conclude, the capability for local support is present but hard work is required to quash this oft-repeated but faulty perception.
The next survey finding shows the median age of the open source community is 30, which is lower than the median age of the population. 42% are between 25 and 34. 7.3% were women (and the majority were web developers) which was surprisingly low. The Waughs – with a 1:1 male:female ratio in their organisation – suggest this figure has been lower and is only increasing since the commencement of the annual Linux.conf.au conference and its Linuxchix mini-conference. Whereas the relative youth of the open source community is not surprising, the very low percentage of females involved is both surprising and disappointing.
65% of survey respondents are members of a user group or other open source group, although this is not altogether surprising given that those not engaging with the open source community would have had far less exposure to the existence of the survey itself, let alone the opportunity to submit.
Moving on, the survey found while 54% of respondents were University graduates, 67% believed their open source skills were learned outside formal education. Despite this, people’s exposure to open source mostly coincided with their time at University.
Enough of this; let’s get onto the result everyone wants to know: how much will it pay? Please read on.
David Bass
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