Open Source Victoria

ANNOUNCING THE FORMATION OF OPEN SOURCE VICTORIA

12 November 2002

Contact: Con Zymaris
		 03 9642 5997

Melbourne, VIC --


A new advocacy group, Open Source Victoria, has been formed to educate
Victoria's business and government leaders about the benefits of using
Open Source software for both server and desktop environments.

Open Source Victoria also intends to seek State funding from the Next
Wave program in order to set up an Open Source Cluster in Victoria.

Two recent trends have highlighted the many benefits of using
free-to-modify Open Source software.

Globally, Open Source Software has found great popularity in national
and local governments. It is undeniable that Open Source Software saves
taxpayers money. It has also promotes greater transparency of
government, and makes the bureaucracy more accountable to the citizens
who pay for it.

The maturing of many Open Source products has turned heads. Many
business leaders are realising that there are robust Open Source
products that in many cases are technically superior to their
proprietary counterparts.

Open Source Victoria will promote the use of free-to-modify Open Source
technologies including, but not limited to:

        * Open Source operating systems Linux and FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD
        * OpenOffice, the free MS Office alternative
        * MySQL and PostgreSQL, both robust, free databases
        * Apache, the ubiquitous web server
        * 4GL RAD programming languages such as Perl, Python, and PHP
		* Content Management Solution, Zope 

We will also seek to promote the use of the many Open Source tools
available for Windows, including many of the above.

Our focus will be to develop an ICT Open Source Cluster in Victoria
capable of servicing Australia's software development needs. In part we
will do this by raising awareness of the many benefits of choosing Open
Source technologies, both in government and in business.

Open Source Victoria believes that the uptake of Open Source techology
in Victoria holds the key to advancing the IT sector in Australia. By
choosing free-to-modify operating systems and components, our businesses
are freed to employ local developers to customise and adapt these
products to their own needs. 

Additionally, because of the distributed nature of Open Source
development, we foresee the possibility of Melbourne becoming a
world-class centre for Open Source software development. Proprietary
software development by its very nature tends to be clustered around
foreign corporate headquarters (eg Microsoft in Seattle.) More work
needs to be done to attract investments like IBM's recent decision to
open a 300-man Linux development office in Ballarat.

At a time when the local IT industry is in a terrible slump, we believe
the uptake of Open Source technology will provide us with an opportunity
to keep development dollars in Australia--rather than exporting them to
proprietary software companies overseas.

More information on the Next Wave program can be found at

        http://www.mmv.vic.gov.au/nextwave


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