LocalFOSS

The Australia Innovation Festival (http://ausinnovation.org) was launched last Friday at the ABC with Senator Coonan giving great praise to Australian companies who are being particularly innovative. Linux Australia was very excited to hear about these successes, particularly because many are based on Open Source technologies. Open Source development has created a variety of low risk, highly scalable and low cost platforms on which Australian organisations can be extremely innovative. They can also leverage a huge community of developers, users and testers to become world leaders in their industry.

To find out more about Open Source and how it can help your organisation be more innovative, come to the Linux Australia stand at CeBIT from May 9-11. We will be running a seminar about how Open Source unpins Australian innovation at CeBIT.

Rising Sun Pictures is such an example. Bruno Mattarollo, the CTO says "innovative solutions built using Open Source enable Rising Sun Pictures to constantly deliver a high quality of visual effects for Hollywood blockbusters such as Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and the soon to be released Superman Returns." Rising Sun Pictures will be presenting at the Innovation Festival about their success in such a fiercely competitive market.

Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, a leading researcher and software developer at CSIRO believes that "without Open Source, the groundbreaking research and development we do would be impossible!". Gernot Heiser, also a leading researcher and software developer at NICTA and a Professor at the University of NSW says "Open source and open standards are essential to our work -- global collaboration requires openness and standardisation, and for mission-critical tools it is paramount that we can fix problems ourselves rather than having to wait for suppliers to do so."

Linux Australia President, Jon Oxer remarks "Open Source developers show that great innovation can happen through global collaboration and sharing of information. Also small businesses greatly benefit from leveraging Open Source, and as a small business owner, I have been able to build a successful business on the flexibility and scalability that Open Source offers."

Many great innovations are coming out of Australian research using Open Source Software. Pia Waugh, the research coordinator for ASK-OSS (The Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software) says, "Through our work with leading Australian research projects, we have have discovered that large amounts of OSS are being used, and large amounts of software are being developed and released as OSS. Open source technologies and methodologies are really integral to the research sector in Australia". Several examples of research innovation can be seen on the ASK-OSS website (http://ask-oss.mq.edu.au) and ASK-OSS is an Australian Government sponsored research project, part of the Backing Australia's Ability - Building our Future through Science and Innovation package (http://backingaus.innovation.gov.au/).