Open Source Industry Australia

OSIA is Australia's national Open Source Industry Association. It exists to provide authoritive and consistent information about Open Source Software, and to support and benefit its member organisations.

EVENTS:
AGM & Board Meeting:
The OSIA Annual General Meeting will be held in conjunction with OSDC
in Canberra on Monday 14 November

MEMBERS (and POTENTIAL MEMBERS) Networking Events
SYDNEY:
The meeting to have been held 20th October 2011 at North Sydney has been deferred.

MELBOURNE:
TBA
Previous meeting 28 September, 2011
Speaker:  Graeme Bryan
Online Marketing 101

General OSIA NEWS September 2011
Dear OSIA members,

It's been a few months since the new committee formed and we've been
busy on your behalf with events and news. Please read on.

*CeBit 2011*
OSIA ran a stand with three member companies exhibiting their wares:
Pretaweb, Polonious and Open Gear. 89 leads where generated for these
partners and the greater OSIA network. If you received a lead, please
tell us how it went. I'll start, Polonious (my company) are well down
the track to helping a System Integrator in the Banking space with
utilising Open Source to improve Bank service delivery. This single
piece of work was well worth the cost and time to exhibit. I hope we'll
see you there along with our sponsor banners.. Speaking of which..

Red Hat are the Gold sponsor for OSIA 2011-12
Thanks to the good offices of Bob Waldie, sponsorship committee, Red Hat
have offered to become our Gold sponsor for the year. We thank the Red
Hat team for their support (they are excellent ambassadors for Open
Source) and urge you to thank them at the next conference or business
event you see them.

South Australian Open Source Event in conjunction with OpenSA
In mid June OpenSA and OSIA collaborated in presenting the seminar "Open
Source: sustainable alternative for information management".
Approximately 80 people attended.

*August Melbourne event*
Organised by Daniel the events committee chair.

There we 11 attendees. Martin Fuggle gave a good presentation about
Adaxxa and their product which is based around Adempiere. He mentioned
some good argument in favour of Open source which gave them an edge v/s
some other close source competitors, for example access to code so they
can integrate with other software such as Asterix.

Discussion following talk was lively. We stayed longer than planned.

Thanks to Adaxxa for contributing to the catering of the event and to
Martin for his presentation.

Daniel is considering another similar event in Melbourne, late September
(28). The current title for the presentation is 'Open Source Marketing
strategies'. Please show your interest and contact Daniel.

Upcoming events

OSDC / AGM
OSDC's conference is in Canberra this year, from November 14 to 18.
We're looking at a side event/get together with members including the
Annual General Meeting. There will be a focus on Government and we
understand a decent number of Federal Government people will be
attending. It's a great chance to mix it up with the newest technologies
and techniques and talk business (and government if you're that way
inclined).We hope to see you there.

Sydney Meeting
We're looking to run another Sydney meeting in late September. Probable
venue at this stage is 551 Pacific Hwy, St Leonards (Polonious' office).

Linux Conf 2012 - Ballarat
The annual Linux.conf.au will be held in Ballarat from 16 to 20 January
2012. OSIA submitted a proposal to run a miniconf titled 'The Business
of Open Source' and it's likely we will be jointly running it with HP.
We're hoping to plan a dinner for members (going dutch - don't get too
excited) and a chance to work through how we as a group can help each
other out there. This is something the commercial vendors do a little
better than us currently so come along, have your say and let's get Open
Source engaged making Australia a more productive country... and perhaps
a little bit of manna for making it so.

Best regards,
Stuart Guthrie
OSIA Chairman

DIRECTORS FOR 2011:
Stuart Guthrie, Polonious, Sydney (OSIA Chair)
Bob Waldie, OpenGear, Brisbane (Funding)
Bob Birchall, Calyx, Sydney (Membership)
Daniel Jitnah, GreenwareIT, Melbourne (Events)
Simon Roberts, Chronolabs, Sydney (Infrastructure)
Steve Dalton, Refactor, Gold Coast (Publicity)
Carl Holden, Holden Dynamics, Sydney (Government Relations)
Jack Burton, SAOSCE, Adelaide (Alliances)

LATEST NEWS - FROM THE INDUSTRY:
OSIA commends AGIMO's decision and sees bright future for open source software (click for more)

LATEST NEWS - FROM GOVERNMENT:
AGIMO Open Source Software Policy - applies to any ICT procurement activity commenced after 1st March 2011
A Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies - for comment - closes 15th April 2011 *
* Please note: OSIA will be responding to the above

WEBSITE NOTE: we are currently updating our website's content.

Links:
Open Source Consortium