[plug] MS bleeding Australia dry

[Colin Muller]

Leon Brooks wrote:
> 
> Colin Muller wrote:
> > "Australia's problem is that while its economy has achieved major
> > breakthroughs in recent years in boosting productivity and also
> > utilising technology, [it] has fallen behind in the growth of output in
> > the IT [information technology] sector," he said.
> 
> ie, buying too much gear and software in instead of making it locally.
> 
> Fix the national debt, ease the trade imbalance, use Linux?

It's a point I've used successfully before as part of an argument in
favour of using open source software on a project. Depends on the
client's sense of (or legal obligation to pretend to have a sense of)
this sort of thing, of course: if a client is part of - or funded by -
the government, for example, this can be presented as a social
responsibility issue, and the macro-economic cost of using imports can
be presented as a point of vulnerability to public criticism (which is
exactly what it should be, in my view). Your mileage will definitely
vary from client to client, inside and outside government, but I've
found it worth slipping a paragraph about this into proposals. Makes
people think about it for a millisecond, if nothing else.

Along similar lines, buying local support for open source products
contributes to the development of local IT expertise. Buying imported
software contributes to the development of IT expertise in R&D labs in
the source country. There's a danger of painting all this a bit too
monotonally, of course - but the basic considerations are real.

Colin