Government was once the great hope for open source but it will continue to diminish due to a lack of support according to the CIOs of Australia's largest government agencies.

Free and open source software continues to gain traction in the South African government with more than 90 percent of CIOs and IT managers in favour of using OSS in their departments.

Government CIOs that dismiss open source software because of support issues, which is the case for the Australian Tax Office, Defence and Centrelink, simply do not understand the concept, according to Sun Microsystems.

"...it doesn't seem to fit with the spirit of open source. When I think open source I think freely available source, not source I can get once I've paid for a license. Is this just a lack on my part of really understanding open source?..."

Hal Steger and Alberto Onetti - both of mobile open-source leader Funambol - discuss open-source marketing in the Enterprise Open Source Journal. Well worth a read, especially for those who persist in believing that open source succeeds in the absence of good marketing. In fact, real commercial success in open source comes as a direct result of savvy marketing.

Public sector and government organizations around the world are adopting increasingly mature open-source products, with Australia at the front of the trend.

Red Hat today published a new study together with Georgia Tech mapping open source activity across 75 countries. Officially called the Open Source Index (OSI), the final score is made of a number of factors including policies, practices in the Government, Industry, and Community.

Slow adoption of open source and free software in UK schools can be attributed to the same kind of inertia that afflicts SMEs in the UK.

Because it lacks the expensive licensing that is often the hallmark of proprietary software, open source is regularly touted as a way for IT departments to make their budget stretch a little bit further and it has already enjoyed considerable success in certain areas of the enterprise, such as web servers.