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-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from ZDNet Australia. --------------------------------------------------------------
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Open Source Misunderstood
October 13, 2000 URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/Open-Source-Misunderstood-/0,139023165,120103884,00.htm
Local IT managers are generally aware of the term 'Open Source' but their understanding of the concepts is questionable, judging by the results of a new survey. There is some confusion between Open Source and shareware or public domain software, Don Griffith of Curtin University Information Systems told the Open Source - AUUG '99 conference in Melbourne last week. Preliminary analysis of survey results suggests that a perceived lack of support for open source products was a major issue for IT managers. Results also indicated that IT managers do not recognise the value of peer review of code. The survey was sent to 470 individually identified IT managers at the top 500 organisations in the BRW 1000. Only 64 responses were received by August 10, however, this 13.6 percent response rate is -considered good" for a survey of this type, Griffith said. While 73 percent of respondents were aware of the open source concept, their awareness of specific open source projectsââ,¬"apart from Linuxââ,¬"was low, and the usage even lower. Higher levels of usage were noted for Web-related tools such as PERL, Samba, Apache and Squid. However, it is possible that IT managers are not fully aware of the usage of open source software in their organisations. Respondents expressed the greatest concern about the lack of support, uncertain direction of future development and lack of training. The greatest benefits were seen as the zero purchase cost, vendor independence and royalty-free redistribution. Delegates, including keynote speaker Eric Raymond (who drew a capacity audience earlier Wednesday morning), wondered whether the low value ascribed to peer review might have been different if the questionnaire had specifically asked about the reliability of open source. Only 11 respondents (19 percent) said their organisation had a policy on open source products, of which three explicitly forbade the use of free software and a fourth had a standard operating environment based on -the products of a single multinational vendor". Around 150 delegates attended the Open Source - AUUG '99 conference.
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