Open Source group say $150m govt. savings achievable
Open Source group say $150m govt. savings achievable
Open source advocates in Victoria are calling on federal, state and local governments to be more inclusive with their software procurement policies, claiming that savings of up to $150 million can be realised by opening up the market.
The Open Source Victoria (OSV) industry cluster, which consists of over 100 Victorian firms and developers who provide services and technology relating to free and open source software, believes that not enough competition currently exists for the procurement of infrastructure and desktop software in the government and public sectors in Australia.
Such has been the commoditisation in recent years of a growing amount of system and application software components, with file, print and email servers, DNS, web, proxy and other edge-of-network servers, firewalls, smaller database and application servers, desktop operating systems and desktop productivity suites all now available in open source implementations that support a broad range of operating systems and carry no licence costs, that OSV is strongly recommending that governments begin the process of preparing migration plans to these platforms over the coming years. The organisation is certain this is the best way forward in terms of increasing competition in that space and ensuring that software vendors' prices are competitive.
"To give an indication of just what kind of money can be saved, Microsoft has recently released a statement where they claim to receive around $175 million per year from the Australian government and public sector" said OSV member, Rod Clarkson. "Most of this money will be in the form of software which is predominantly for server and desktop systems and application software, just the type which can be replaced through commodity open source equivalents."
"Whilst governments cannot avoid purchasing hardware and they must also hire IT staff to build and run systems, there's no reason nowadays for ploughing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into easily avoided costs," added fellow OSV member Adam Crow.
The OSV suggests that the government should exercise the power it has to exclude certain providers from procurement bids where it deems that provider is endangering fair competition, citing a recent example that took place in Tasmania as to how effective this could be.
"In Tasmania, the government elected to exclude Telstra from a wide-ranging tender which seeks to develop improved broadband links to the mainland," said Clarkson. "The government realised that in a market dominated by Telstra, this kind of action is the only way to break the vicious circle which keeps other competitors out of the market."
Crow then appealed to local, state and federal governments to take such action to help reduce Microsoft's market dominance.
"We want governments to consider this procurement option in the software space. Specifically, by excluding Microsoft from just a single software-platform refresh cycle in those areas where Linux and open source software are a good fit for government. This is what's needed to grow competition in the marketplace in the future. If state governments can do this for broadband, they can do this for software, too."
Clarkson concluded: "As local businesses, we are concerned that monopoly vendors have been taking advantage of the government's inertia, to lock them into expensive and suboptimal solutions. We offer our organisation's skills and knowledge in reducing vendor lock-in situations, thus achieving the greatest competitive environment possible, benefiting all Australian governments."
Microsoft were invited to comment on this subject, but had not responded at time of publication.
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