[Talk] Chilling effect?

[Leon Brooks]

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.

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.

None of the three would explain why this was so, and said peer was not 
in a situation to press them on the issue (read: many tens of thousands 
of dollars' worth of work hanging in the balance in each case).

Have any of you run across this kind of behaviour (or more of it) just 
in the last month or two?

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?

If you'd like an anonymous word, mail me saying so and I'll post the 
body of your message completely sanitised and delete your original 
email from my systems.

Cheers; Leon

-- 
http://cyberknights.com.au/     Modern tools; traditional dedication
http://plug.linux.org.au/       Vice President, Perth Linux User Group
http://slpwa.asn.au/            Committee Member, Linux Professionals WA
http://linux.org.au/            Past Committee Member, Linux Australia