Most “IT Pro’s” in Australia actually have little to none creative or developmental capacity.

Looking over assets listings for a client I see countless line items for software, where tens of thousands of dollars have been spent on software that have better Open Source or SaaS alternatives available.

Discussions on LinkedIn boards talk about “What is best software for this?  Which vendor?”  Hardly a conversation about how “This is great” or “Or I used this library with this project and solved this problem while not spending $$ and adding to our own IP collection”.

It seems IT workers in this country are glorified order (procurement) takers and givers?  And those that actually can to the work and be creative are stuck at the bottom of the food chain and never listened too.

Is this how Silicon Alley or Valley works?  Or how Eastern Europe has surged forward? Or China, India and the Philippines?

Australia – you need to embrace INNOVATION and self driven productivity and not being glorified LEGO builders (NBN!!).  Otherwise I can’t see how Australia will have any IT industry left over?

And the next person that states that Australia or the way we do it has something to do with better “Quality” I am going to brain them for being so naive and self delusional.

And where is all the Open Source fun?  The JAVA and Python and Perl and what not?  Everything seems to be .Net and Microsoft.   I’m not silly enough to enquire about Ruby or Rails though.  :-s

Well, we came, we championed, we explained, we lobbied and we taught. We laughed, we gathered, we swapped tales and we helped clear up some misconceptions.

The sun was out, the sky was blue(ish – not bad by Beijing’s standards) and the students were happy and eager to learn what was going on and to quench their tech/FOSS thirsts. Tsing Hua got rained on by a heap of tech loving goodness!

Photo gallery after the jump….

Anyway, thanks to Google, RedHat, Red Flag, Mozilla and OpenMoko. They paid up cold hard cash to make it all happen. The rest of us did it FOSS style and donated servers, bandwidth, time and eagerness. But at the end of the day, cold hard currency talks!

Click HERE for more info from my previous post.

September 15th, 2007
Tsinghua University East Gate, FIT Building,
No. 1 Zhong Guan Cun Road, Beijing, China

SFD China Webpage in English and Chinese