[Linux-aus] Chilling effect?

[Brendon Chase]

>Recently, a denizen of the PLUG mailing list asked the National 
>Australia Bank why they don't support Mozilla. NAB's reply amounted to 
>"because it's Open Source" and they have so far refused to explain how 
>this has any bearing on their policy.

Interesting considering this:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.national.com.au

They don't seem to mind open source, it might have more to do with the
demographics of their user base on Windows running IE. (like it or not)


>Yesterday, I had a discussion with a fellow FOSS advocate in which he 
>related to me that three of his customers (one Government department 
>and two over-$100M/a corporations) have recently said, point blank, 
>that they now have a policy of no Open Source at all, and that such 
>Open Source applications and/or operating systems as existed in the 
>company were to be promptly replaced.

That's weird.  I would have thought these types of organisations would judge
software on it's own merits rather than the licence it comes with.

Also a rip and replace scenario sounds expensive.

However, not knowing specifics it is hard to judge.  Cost and scalability
might be the overwhelming factors in such organisations.

>Do any of you live on the other side of this question, and know of any 
>specific reason why these organisations might be doing this?

I've heard "Poor documentation, little or no support, security, scaleablity"
among a few - mind you none of these factors are specific to FOSS.  It has
more to do with perception.