"Legislation for open source is ridiculous," said Bruce McCabe, managing director of research firm S2 Intelligence.
Why should open-source software get preferential treatment in government, McCabe asked.
He said it's imperative for the purchasing habits of government agencies to change. "It's about education and not legislation," he told reporters at an IT conference in Brisbane.
Several states and politicians are pushing to mandate or "consider" open-source software during IT buying cycles.
On the SCO Group's actions against open source, McCabe said IT managers in Australia are not losing sleep over the company's threats. "[If anything] SCO has cut their own throats by threatening their customers," said McCabe.
Meanwhile, interviews with 70 Australian CIOs conducted by S2 Intelligence revealed different "maturity levels" for Linux adoption in enterprises.
"They [CIOs] are happy with Linux on servers because it lowers cost but on the client side, the jury is still out," McCabe said.
He added that there won't be any meaningful presence of Linux on desktops for at least two years.
Only three percent of the top 1,000 companies in Australia have Linux installed on the desktop but it's mostly in the education sector, he said.
"Why should open-source software get preferential treatment in government, McCabe asked."
Because the government has a responsibility to ensure that publicly owned data is not locked within proprietary formats and applications. Open-source software guarantees that this cannot happen. Cost and features are very important considerations but they are dwarfed by the danger of losing control over your own data. This is one of the reasons why some departments choose to write their own software rather than buy COTS, even though that option is often more expensive.
"He added that there won't be any meaningful presence of Linux on desktops for at least two years."
2 years ago, these same analysts were saying that Linux would never have _any_ presence on the desktop. 5 years ago, they were saying that Linux would never penetrate the enterprise market. 8 years ago, they were saying Linux would never get into the server market. I'm sure 2 years from now the analysts will have another worthless opinion about what Linux "won't be" doing.
Why don't analysts be honest and call themselves "opinionists"? When all is said and done, opinions without factual basis or logical reasoning are all that these analysts can offer.