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Penguin Not Taking Flight Down Under

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the flightless-birds dept.

Bill Bennett writes "New Zealand Reseller News reports that Linux adoption down under is three times lower than North America. From the article: 'Adoption of open source software is slow in the Australasian region according to a report from analyst firm Forrester. Only 18% of the businesses in Australia and New Zealand surveyed for the report were using Linux, while 11% were considering its use. Analyst Sam Higgins says the low rate - three times lower than North America - is because open source is caught between two worlds. He says customers have been conditioned to buy software from vendors and their approved partners.'"

3 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. Linux is for poor people by Rinkhals · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If it's anything like it is in South Africa, there will be a strong perception that "Windows is for serious professionals on the cutting edge, other OSes are for everybody else."

    Notwithstanding that Ubuntu (the word, the concept and the distro) originates in South Africa.

    Nevermind....

    --
    "I'm a snake if we disagree"-Jethro Tull, Bungle in the Jungle
  2. Size of Economy by Redge · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Australia is small in comparison to the US and Europe - stating the obvious I know... But very relevant.

    I work in IT for a Medium sized company - by Medium I mean 500 staff. I have 4 citrix servers, 1 file and print server and 1 database server and 1 exchange server. WIndows 2000 AD. I have an ISA server on the edge and a couple of PC's with server OS installed on it doing various little "things" inside the network.

    We just got VMWARE ESX to try and get rid of the PC's.

    The 3 main applications we use are Windows based... There is no alternative for 1 of them... we would have to write our own. We have no Linux skills internally - we would have to hire in or skillup. We have no money to spend on a large scale development project to give us the software we need to change over. We can't afford the duplicate hardware to allow the parallel running required to make the change over a smooth as possible.

    Granted all this can be staggered BUT... I recently asked the owners of the company to give me $200 000 to put in a complete DR solution and they said no - without even considering it. Imagine asking for a million dollars to change the whole network over.... and they ask WHY? - and I say: Linux is a better philosophy for running a computer network, and we'll save money - HOW much? I don't know, but we will. HOW long will it take to see the savings? Years and years.

    Somebody up the back is now mentioning the savings on license costs... Sure - if you were building a network for a brand new company this would be considerable - for an already establised MS shop, these costs are annoying yet manageable.

    I am very impressed with Linux (the VMWARE ESX version anyway). I have played with Linux before and I knew there were things about it that were better than MS - but it's not until it's in production on enterprise level hardware that you really appreciate it's simplicity and robustness. And it doesn't crash - ever.

    It's simple really - there are probably 200 companies in Australia that have 3000 staff or more (not counting government departments), of those 200 companies maybe half of them are doing something with Linux because they can AFFORD to - they have the budget and the staff.

    All the rest of us struggle on with what we've got - and if what you've got works - and your $100 million a year in turn over company keeps making money - how do you justify the change?

  3. Re:18 %? by woddy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You're not an evangelist, your a pragmatist. Welcome to the club. :) Re: Linux/OSS uptake in AU, some of the fault lies in the education system that has it's head stuck in Microsoft butt (TM). As a TAFE teacher I find it annoying on a daily basis how closed minded higher level IT management is. It has been a real struggle encorporating linux/BSD into the curriculum for networking over the years I have been there. I believe in teaching a generic version of computer networking that can be applied to whatever OS you happen to be using. Unfortunately, this is not a view shared by everyone involved in teaching computer studies at the TAFE. I hear pro-Microsoft raves from teachers with an MSCE, or MCP and I cringe. I don't want no Microsoft, I want even exposure to a broad range of the OS software that is out there. I wish TAFE did too.