Proceedings of the Chapter Seminar held Thu, Nov 15, 2007 6:00 PM at NICTA Australian Technology Park Sydney
Pia Waugh: Open Source - The Opportunities for Australia
Pia presented regarding Open Source and demonstrated one of the One Laptop Per Child machines (a very nicely engineered bit of gear) and a summary of her comments follows:
"Open Source Software (OSS) provides not only an enormous pool of scalable, robust and innovative technologies, but also a broad opportunity economically and socially.
Australia has a $21b ICT trade deficit, that is 80% of the total Australian trade deficit. As an industry we can work to improve our exports to help balance out this deficit, and the best path to better exports is services. Open Source provides Aussie companies great opportunities to build on existing software and create the smart value-add that we are so good at, while leveraging an existing global skills base and name, as many successful Open Source projects can provide. It is hard to build new innovative software from scratch with the development costs, maintenance, marketing and more. Building on existing Open Source projects reduces both the cost and time to market, while leveraging the collaborative efforts of companies and individuals around the world.
Socially, Open Source provides freely available tools to everyone, which means even the most underpriveleged in our society can (with meagre hardware resources) participate in the global information society. It also provides extensive documentation, training and a strong community of professionals, so anyone can go from zero to hero by participating in the Open Source community. Projects like the One Laptop Per Child are excellent examples of where a view to openness needs to be the default to ensure inclusiveness, choice, the harnessing of skills beyond a single organisation, and the best possible learning and collaboration opportunities.
Open Source is driving so much of our existing world, including over 65% of all websites, 60% of the top 500 supercomputers, trusted institutions like Google and Yahoo, 80% of phone calls are terminated on carrier grade Linux. Open Source has now started getting onto the desktop (including Open Source applications on Windows) so it is now available to everyone."
- http://slug.org.au/ - Sydney Linux Users Group
- The business case for OSS
- http://linux.org.au/linux - Linux Australia and about OSS
- http://www.iosn.net/publications - United Nations papers on OSS
- http://laptop.org/ - One Laptop Per Child
More about Pia Waugh
Chapter Update
Kate Carruthers, Chapter Chair, spoke briefly reminding attendees that revitalizing our Chapter is in our own hands. She also noted that the new Chapter Committee has committed to running more events in 2008 and providing more opportunities for networking. A vote of thanks was also made to Committee member Mark Phillips, who kindly organised this event.
Senior Member Discussion
Bruce Poon the IEEE NSW Membership officer attended and explained to interested members the process and requirements for upgrading from member to senior member level. Bruce will provide information which will be emailed out to all Chapter members who have experessed interest. It should be distributed in a few weeks and will be noted in the online commmunity.
More information about the Chapter
All NSW Chapter events are listed in our Online Community (any IEEE members can sign up to view them).