Tuesday, 18 March, 2003
Govt hears no open source clamour
"It's a matter for each agency to make its own decision
Stephen Bell, Wellington
The State Service Commission's
e-government unit says it's not being swamped by demand for open source information
from government agencies, in contrast to its Australian counterpart.
Deidre Butler, convenor of Govis, the government
information managers forum, says she has detected no recent demand for improved
knowledge of open source. It's not recently been a topic on the mailing lists
and wasn't mentioned at a recent Govis forum coordination meeting, she says.
And the e-government unit has no plans to emulate an open source software
education exercise put on by Australia's National Office of the Information
Economy (NOIE) last month, despite the success of the event.
The seminars included speakers from the vendor community such as pro-OSS
IBM and OSS-sceptic Microsoft, along with the Australian Unix Users Group
and IT managers from the Department of Veterans' Affairs and the Bureau of
Meteorology — both users of open source. CIOs from Australian government
departments and agencies were in the audience, and NOIE says there will most
likely be other such events.
"This will probably be the first of a series,"
said NOIE chief John Rimmer. "And it would be very useful if we could get
other agencies to speak at future seminars about their experiences with open
source software as it develops."
