Angus Kidman01 April 2008, 5:07 PM
Open source in Australia has gone well and truly past the "one geek and a server" stage, an independent report has shown.
The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Census 2007
http://census.waughpartners.com.au, due to be officially released in Sydney
on Tuesday night, canvassed the views of 129 self-identified open source
software companies in Australia, ranging from single-person operations to
global giants like IBM.
"The industry as a whole is earning $500 million," said Jeff Waugh,
co-founder of Waugh Partners, which conducted the survey online late last
year. "Directly open source related earnings are about $300 million, but the
reason why we're distinguishing between these numbers is the industry is not
just companies that build open source software. They also use open source
products to support other parts of their business as well."
Waugh said the figure was calculated by taking the midpoint earnings figures
specified by companies who took part, and extrapolating over the broader ICT
industry using existing data such as surveys by the Australian Bureau of
Statistics and Australian Computer Society. Waugh Partners estimates the
respondents represent about a quarter of the overall industry.
"The kinds of services that were most popular among the companies were the
mainstays of open source services: software development and customisation,
implementation, and migration," Waugh said. Well-established open source
platforms such as Linux, Apache and PHP were well represented but there's
also evidence of activity more complex enterprise software packages such as
CRM, business intelligence and ERP. "Open source is not just this one niche
-- it crosses the entire set of products and services."
Waugh said a major aim of the survey was to correct misconceptions about the
nature of open source development and its use in commercial environments.
"We need real numbers so our industry has something to stand behind."
One common misconception concerns size. While 50% of the companies surveyed
had fewer than five employees, that's a smaller proportion than for the
industry as a whole (78% according to the most recent ACS survey). "That
really bucks the trend of the idea of the lone open source guy plonking a
server down and then wandering away," Waugh said.
According to the study, 46% of the companies involved earned 70% or more of
their income from open source projects. Waugh noted that if very large
companies such as IBM, which has a significant open source development
presence largely located in Canberra, were excluded, the numbers would be
even higher. "A lot of the smaller companies had a much larger proportion of
their income directly related to open source," he told APC.
The survey also suggests that university education regarding IT needs a
major change in approach. The industry doesn't regard formal education as
the best place to get open source skills," Waugh said. "What they look for
is participation in the open source community and previous experience in
open source companies."
"There's a lot for the formal education institutions to learn from that
about what the practical and valuable things to learn are, how to learn
those things and the value of community. In university, you very rarely
learn how to read code, but it's one of the most practical things to learn.
Normally in university, you're writing your own code, which is something you
do very rarely in real life."
"Another major concern is dealing with the misconception in the marketplace
that there is no support for open source in Australia," Waugh said. Surveys
of federal government employees have consistently identified this is a
problem for open source implementations, he added. In the AGIMO
Open source is also increasing its contribution to exports, the survey
found. 37% of companies surveyed had an overseas presence, though only 7%
had their main headquarters overseas. "We have quite a large proportion of
our companies doing exports, which is good," Waugh said.
Waugh Partners is looking to repeat the survey in the future to track
industry growth, and is also considering a similar project in New Zealand.