[H-GEN] A promo project for HUMBUG and Linux.

[Arjen Lentz]

Hi Carl

> I don't want to politicize this discussion, but I've long been of the
> opinion that FOSS has major implications for education, manufacturing,
> and defence in Australia. I wrote to the then Defence Minister about
> this some time back

Wow you covered quite a few different topics in your letter.

Anyway, regarding use of FLOSS in Defence, there's heaps of it.
I've done training at Defence and there's Linux, Python, PHP, MySQL, and so on.
The techs who make things work and develop tools do not need convincing, in any way, they use this stuff on a daily basis.

Now, if you ask someone at the top, you may well get an official nondescript answer which might even say something about some major brands and such... but that really is not what keeps the whole thing ticking and doing what needs doing, trust me on this.

Others @ HUMBUG also have Defence connections/experience and can confirm the above.
Essentially, I don't think it's something you specifically need to chase as a matter of urgency.


With education there are other tricky aspects which have more to do with ability to manage the huge scale of for instance Ed.Queensland. But, for instance, Ed.Qld uses Joomla for school sites (Joomla's core devs are from Toowoomba), and other FLOSS stuff does get used also. Let's see this is all work in progress, and it's more a matter of time and resources and such than of willingness as such.
I have a personal interest in the edu stuff.

Cheers,
Arjen.
-- 
Arjen Lentz, Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com)
Remote expertise & maintenance for MySQL/MariaDB server environments.

Follow us at http://openquery.com/blog/ & http://twitter.com/openquery