South Australia urged to drop bill on Open Source software (TheAge)

Ironically, one of the parts of the SA IT industry which is vibrant is Linux support. This is mainly done by sole traders and small businesses. These businesses don't have the resources to lobby government to the same extent as large software concerns.

South Australia is not unlike Pittsburgh of the past: the old industries are slowly declining and the search is on for new sources of employment. These new industries are coming from unexpected directions. Few people would have guessed that specialist agriculture or offshore education would now be a significant industry.

This places the SA government in a tricky position, as often when they try to encourage a new industry their efforts are misdirected.

For example, they signed one of the world's largest government IT outsourcing deals with EDS partly to stimulate the growth of a local IT industry. To a large extent this only changed the putative employer of existing IT staff. The outsourcing actually worked against local IT industry, as IT expenditure essentially required the approval of EDS, who would rather use some idle staff located overseas than employ someone local.

As the EDS experience shows, the SA government is a sucker for the "big bang" approach to industry development. Amazingly, last year they fell into this trap again, signing a whole-of-government telecommunications deal with Telstra at rates higher than organisations spending half as much.

This isn't to say that all SA government help is misdirected. A few small loans, grants and projects have significnatly helped South Australia build good games development companies, ISPs and Linux-based businesses. But these funds have been small beer.

Even if the open source bill isn't passed by the state government, the mere existence of the bill means that ministerial staffers need to become familiar with the software market. In the future, those staffers will inevitably ask if there are open source alternatives when government IT project proposals are presented to them. They will also ask "what is the effect of this policy I am considering on the local open source IT industry?".

In that sense, the letter and lobbying from the Initiative for Software Choice to the Premier is counter-productive. I doubt the Premier's senior staff would even know what open source software is. They'll now be fully briefed. They'll now consider our interests too.

Regards
Glen (SA resident, Linux user)